


Ritual, Rhythm, Heartbeat

by firbolg_boyfriends



Category: Dimension 20 (Web Series)
Genre: (ally beardsley voice) gay delayed adolescence, (but don't worry they get their kisses in), Alternate Universe - College/University, And A Touch Of Angst, Background Relationships, Canon-Typical Drinking, Coming of Age, Demi Riz, Flashbacks, Fluff and Humor, Friends to Lovers, M/M, Mutual Pining, Slow Burn, navigating Feelings while aro-spec, when u and ur gay best friend are like 'haha jk unless'
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-04
Updated: 2020-04-19
Packaged: 2021-02-28 21:34:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 31,100
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23483923
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/firbolg_boyfriends/pseuds/firbolg_boyfriends
Summary: "What? You're staring."Fabian shook his head slightly, as if to clear his senses. “The Ball, have you ever kissed anyone?”Riz arched an eyebrow, somewhat confused. “Yeah, I have. Last summer, while you were at sea. Did I never tell you about that?”“I’m mad,” Fabian said softly.Riz looked up at him, frowning. “That I didn't tell you?"“No, I’m mad it wasn’t me. I’m mad I wasn’t your first kiss.”Riz’s hands stilled. Now that was... different.“That’s a dumb thing to be mad about,” Riz heard himself say, heart pounding.Fabian scoffed, lolling his head back and slouching his knees forward. “Don’t I know it.”Riz wasn’t sure what to say. This whole situation felt like it was happening in a dream. “I think Kristen was technically my first kiss, actually,” he said. Deflect, deflect, deflect.Fabian smiled with his eyes closed. “That doesn’t count.” He rolled his head over to fix Riz with that intense stare again. “I bet that kiss with that guy wasn’t very good, either.”Riz snorted. “Wouldn’t you like to know.”“I don’t need to,” Fabian said, sitting up. “‘Cause I already know I’d do it better.”
Relationships: Riz Gukgak/Fabian Aramais Seacaster
Comments: 165
Kudos: 488





	1. Everything Stays

**Author's Note:**

> Me: I'm taking a break from writing d20 fic and I have other stuff to work on anyway  
> My dumb gay brain: But don't you just want to go crazy aaa go stupid aaa  
> Me: ...You're right. [naruto runs headlong into another project]
> 
> A good part of this fic is already partially written and I will continue publishing it as I finish cleaning up and editing the last few scenes! The soundtrack of this story is Conan Gray's wonderful new album Kid Krow, which I am listening to on repeat while writing. Give it a listen <3
> 
> A note! My portrayal of Demi Riz in this story is drawn from my own experience as a demi person. However, the aro and ace spectra are broad and diverse, so if you identify that way, your experience may be different from what is represented in this fic. If that is the case, please know that I am in no way insinuating that this is the only expression of demi-ness or grey-ness that exists! You are valid and much love to you, my friend

There was something comforting about the annual arrival of spring, Riz thought.

Every year like clockwork, the yellow daffodils and purple hyacinths and rosy tulips bloomed on the edge of the sidewalk and the afternoon sky glowed cornflower blue and the sun set later and later, stretching the days out longer and reminding the world that everything changed endlessly forever but at the same time, nothing ever changed at all.

The sun sank lower toward the tree-lined horizon, washing the pavement and the university buildings in liquid gold as Riz made his way across the lawn in front of the Dance building, wingtips hush-hushing in the damp grass. Birds twittered from nearby alder trees above the hum of a passing bicycle, the chatter of a crowd of students flowing out of the entrance double-doors, the beating of Riz’s own heart.

It was his eighth spring of knowing his best friend. Eight times the sun had returned after a dark winter, eight times a school year had wound down to its demise, an innumerable number of gradually warmer sunsets. A lot of things were different now than they’d been eight years ago, but the sun kept setting, and spring kept coming, and Fabian kept waving at him as he walked towards him, blinding grin even brighter than his hair.

Fabian’s favorite dance class outfits involved neon-colored crop tops, neon-colored cropped hoodies, and the skintightest skintight leggings manufactured by man, elf, or otherwise, which meant that as he walked out of the Dance building every afternoon, not only were his sculpted abs and powerful thighs on display for all of society but any casual passersby could partake in viewing his… well. All of his. Everything that he had going on Down There. Riz still wasn’t entirely sure if it was a deliberate fashion choice. (It probably was.)

“Hey, The Ball,” Fabian greeted Riz, slinging a muscular arm around his shoulders and leaning into him as much as he could without tipping over his small frame.

Fabian smelled like sweat. He always did after dance class. It wasn’t necessarily a nice smell, but Riz had gotten used to it, and after knowing Fabian for so many years he was comforted by its familiarity and had even begun to enjoy the way it mingled with the fruity scent of his hair gel and the faint lavender-detergent of his clothes and whatever remnants were left of his fancy expensive cologne at the end of the day… okay, so maybe Riz was kind of pathetic. There was an outside chance.

“You ever gonna stop calling me that?” Riz sighed as Fabian ruffled his curls. This was their ritual. After knowing each other through four years of high school and four more years of college, Fabian generally called Riz by his real name and had for a while, but The Ball was an affectionate nickname that he threw out from time to time. It didn’t bother Riz; in fact, it did much the opposite now. (But part of that had to do with how lately, anything resembling an affectionate nickname from Fabian was liable to make his heart miss a beat or two.)

“Absolutely not. I don’t think I even know your real name, The Ball,” Fabian scoffed, hoisting his backpack over one shoulder.

“I feel like that’s just a reflection of how dumb you are.”

“Yeah? Well, maybe you just have a dumb name… Rip.”

“Not quite.”

“Rim?”

“Again, near miss. Also, gross.”

“Don’t yuck my yum, Ridge. Some people love eating ass and that’s okay.”

“I never said it wasn’t – ugh, you’re so annoying.” Riz sighed exasperatedly as Fabian dissolved into laughter, swerving away from him on the sidewalk to avoid losing his balance.

God, he looked so handsome when he was laughing. He looked handsome all the time, of course, but mid-laugh he resembled a glistening cover photo of a model, shining like a beacon of joyful male beauty. His whole face stretched taut with his grin and his eyes crinkled up and the happiness bubbled out of him, uncontrolled and unselfconscious. For someone with a history of being so very controlled and self-conscious – a history that wasn’t always totally over – it was especially beautiful to witness.

And here Riz was, waxing poetic about Fabian. Again. When would he ever get a goddamn grip?

“Can you get a grip? Laughing this hard at your own joke is a bad look, Fabian,” Riz said, half laughing himself.

“You just can’t stand how naturally funny I am,” Fabian grinned.

Riz turned away from that blazing, blazing grin.

“You’re right,” he said. Truthfully.

Being around Fabian these days was like standing near an open fire. The air shimmered with heat. Riz’s lungs filled with smoke. He couldn’t completely make sense of what he felt, but he knew it wasn't quite the same as standard-issue friendship – the friendship he felt for Kristen and Gorgug and Adaine and Fig, for example. And he was afraid of his friendship with Fabian changing, because he couldn’t predict what it would become.

Fire was alluring and destructive.

Riz would… deal with it. Compress his feelings like a trash compactor until they were so small as to be entirely insignificant. Couldn’t be too difficult, right? In the meantime, he just had to focus on surviving things like eye contact, and physical touch, and the sensation of Fabian’s gaze on the side of his cheek. Which was happening right now.

“Riz? You good?” Fabian asked. Sweet and earnest. Because he really was sweet and earnest, beneath all his bluster and bravado. It wasn’t even really ‘beneath’ from Riz’s perspective at this point: he knew Fabian so intimately that he understood how all the seemingly disparate parts of him crystallized into an indivisible whole. A beautiful, complicated, beautiful, SO beautiful, so complicated person. Riz’s best friend. (And the love of his life? Maybe? Perhaps?) (Shut up, stupid heart.)

“Yeah, I’m good, Fabes,” Riz said, smiling.

And he was still telling the truth. He was good. Fabian never made him feel unhappy. Just… frustrated. Wistful. Confused. But never truly bad.

“You wanna change before we go to Kristen and Tracker’s place?” he said, changing the subject.

“Nah, we can just head straight there.”

“Are you… sure?”

Fabian’s face contorted into an exaggerated gasp. “Um, do you have a problem with my outfit?”

“I just thought you might wanna wear something more modest in the presence of our clerics.”

“On the contrary, my body itself is divine.” Fabian folded his hands in a prayerful pose and then lightly smacked his own behind, which made Riz crack up so hard his messenger bag almost fell off his shoulder.

Some things never changed. Riz could always count on Fabian to make him laugh, no matter what kind of weird shit was going on with his feelings.

The evening light shadowed the contours of Fabian’s jaw, painting his silver-white hair with a red-gold brush. Blue shadows stretched long across the pavement. The sounds of the university faded into the distance as the sky melted to violet and Riz and his best friend made their way into the quiet, semi-wooded neighborhood where Kristen and Tracker rented a small apartment.

Everything was good. Everything was okay.

(Autumn) (Freshman Year)

Riz loved his Intro to Journalism class. He’d only enrolled in it to get his Writing requirement taken care of, but after having been in it for a couple of weeks, he was starting to feel like maybe he wanted to enroll in mostly Journalism classes from now on. Or only Journalism classes. Okay, maybe that wasn’t realistic. He just needed to finish his dumb Math and Arcana requirements and then he could do whatever he wanted.

Fabian stood waiting for him in the sunlit hallway, which was now mostly empty – Riz’s classmates were gone already. Riz had stayed longer to ask his professor some questions about a famous exposé from twenty years ago because Riz was, possibly, a major geek. There was an outside chance.

“How was your class, The Ball?” Fabian asked, jovially slinging an arm over Riz’s shoulder. (Riz’s tiny frame buckled only slightly.)

“It was so fucking cool! My professor is the fucking coolest. I’m so excited about tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow’s… Saturday?”

Riz elbowed him. “I know that! But I’m gonna start working on this super awesome project for that class. I’m gonna tell you all about it.”

“Oh, I assumed you would.”

Riz proceeded to tell Fabian all about it. His enthusiastic monologue carried the two of them most of the way from central campus along the winding tree-lined streets to their shared dorm in an old brick building near the cafeteria (the shitty cafeteria, not the good cafeteria). Fabian kept his arm around Riz the whole time. It was kind of an awkward manner of walking, but they were used to it; back in high school they’d done a three-legged race to raise money for the drama department, and now it was almost natural for them to move joined at the hip. Or the shoulder.

After starting college about a month ago, Fabian had traded out his high school letterman jacket for a silky maroon bomber with subtle floral embroidery. He kept saying it was just a stand-in for the university letterman jacket he’d inevitably earn, but Riz privately thought it was a good look on him.

And he enjoyed seeing Fabian… coming into himself a little bit. He’d been kind of down over the past summer after he and Aelwen broke up. Like, Riz knew the breakup had been a healthy decision. And Fabian knew that too. And so did Aelwen. (Presumably.) (Riz had never actually talked to her very much – he’d just never taken much of a shine to her personally, but he supported what his best friend wanted. Obviously.)

Of course, just because it was a healthy decision didn’t mean it didn’t hurt. And that grief, combined with the lingering transitional grief of leaving high school and moving on to the next phase of life, had left Fabian fairly melancholy in the summer months. He’d still been Fabian, of course, but his vibrancy had been dialed down a few notches and his crystal texts were less frequent.

But college was a good look on him, much like the bomber jacket. He seemed happier these days. His hair had more volume and shine. After being assigned Riz as a roommate purely by coincidence, he’d even gotten excited about the prospect of decorating together, which made Riz excited in turn. He’d never been a big “decorating” guy, but he’d always been a big “Fabian’s genuine smile” guy.

Fabian squeezed Riz’s shoulder to get his attention. “Hey, Kristen and Tracker wanna come over later and see our dorm. Are you cool with that?”

Kristen and Tracker had requested each other as roommates, but had somehow ended up in a triple with an unfortunate – and hopefully patient – pixie. Their dorm was on the opposite end of campus, in one of the brand-new buildings with brightly colored metal facades and sliding doors and weird, stiff beanbag chairs in all the study rooms.

“Yeah, sure. But that means we have to clean up the floor, right?”

Fabian frowned. “What are you talking about? The floor is fine.”

“Um. Dude. It has your laundry, like, ALL over it.”

Fabian gently kicked Riz’s ankle. “Okay, yeah, but it’s like mostly confined to my side of the room.”

Riz snorted. “Okay, it super isn’t, first of all, and second of all, you’re missing the point of what I was saying. We should pick up all the shit off the floor if we’re having people over.”

“Do we have to?” Fabian whined. “I mean, do Kristen and Tracker even care?”

“I mean, I was more thinking of it from the perspective of where we’re going to sit. We don’t have any chairs, Fabian!”

“I have my desk chair…”

“Which is also full of laundry right now. You don’t have a maid anymore, Fabian, you gotta get it together.”

Fabian grinned. “Aren’t you my maid? Is that not how the roommate system works? I thought one person was the other person’s maid.”

“Ugh, you’re so annoying!”

Riz tried to bite his hand but Fabian reflexively lifted it out of the way, cackling. And then when he noticed Riz gearing up to climb his torso he started sprinting, laughter lifting on the wind. “Hey, stop! My legs are way shorter than yours!” Riz yelled, chasing after him, feet kicking through the dead leaves on the pavement.

Fabian briefly turned back to laugh at him from several yards ahead. His platinum hair was dappled in the late-afternoon sunlight filtering through the golden treetops up above, and his expression was so happy that Riz couldn’t help but smile back even though he knew he was being mocked.

Everything was good. Everything was okay.

(Present Day)

‘hey the ball im coming over make sure u have sweet potato fries’

This was the most recent text on Riz’s crystal. Of course, he hadn’t seen it until after Fabian was already camped out on his living room sofa, wrapped in one of Fig’s flannel band merch blankets and loudly complaining about how there was ‘no good selfie lighting in here’. Riz also didn’t have any sweet potato fries, but that turned out not to be a problem because Fabian had brought them anyway.

Adaine was in her room with the door shut, playing dreamy experimental indie electronica on her speaker and working on her senior thesis. She generally didn’t like having guests in the apartment when she was studying, but Fabian, Kristen, and Gorgug got a free pass because she’d eventually resigned herself to the knowledge that nothing would actually stop them from showing up unannounced whenever they wanted.

Fig still – technically – lived here, but she hadn’t spent the night in her bed in several weeks. She and Ayda hadn’t moved in together after high school like Tracker and Kristen had, but Fig was on tour with Gorgug for half the year and when she wasn’t on tour, she slept over at Ayda’s place. Riz had no idea why they didn’t just make it official. Then again, he couldn’t complain about Fig’s continuing rent contribution and the interesting candles she left all over the place.

Riz himself was buried deep in a research project for his Journalism senior seminar. He’d set up a station at the dining room table (complete with its ‘Fig and the Sig Figs’ promotional tablecloth and mismatched thrift store chairs). The entirety of the table surface had disappeared under a slurry of papers and loose pens, with his overflowing brief case, overheated laptop, and overused steno pad surrounding him like a makeshift command center. He barely noticed when Fabian set a plate of reheated sweet potato fries and a glass of orange juice next to his elbow.

“You need vitamin C,” he heard Fabian say.

“Mmm.”

“Eat that before it gets cold.”

“Mm-hmm.”

“The Ball.”

“Mmm.”

Fabian flopped over the back of the sofa, pouting. “Pay attention to me.”

Riz let out a put-upon sigh and pivoted his body to look at his best friend. He probably needed a break anyway; he’d been working for… a long time. Three hours maybe?

“You need a break. You’ve been working on that for six hours.”

Riz frowned. “Six? How do you know?”

“Well, at least six. I just know you were texting me about it around noon, and I know exactly what you’re like so I don’t think you’ve stopped since then.”

Riz smiled sheepishly. Fabian was probably right. And he was also inclined to do whatever Fabian said when his hair was all messed up from lying on the couch cushions. It was weaponized cuteness, really. “Well, what do you wanna do?”

Fabian smiled, pleased with the victory of dragging Riz away from his work. Smug bastard. “Have you been outside yet today?”

“Yeah, I went to the laundromat this morning. It was nice out.”

“Okay, that’s good. You need vitamin D.”

“What’s with you and vitamins lately?”

“It just occurred to me recently that since you’re, like, a nerd and all, and I’m all athletic and cool, it’s my moral duty to make sure you stay healthy.”

Riz crumpled a piece of scrap paper and threw it at him. Fabian effortlessly caught it and lobbed it right back, guffawing as Riz scrambled to dodge. “You’re an asshole,” Riz chuckled.

“I mean, yeah. But you love me.”

Riz did.

“Don’t bet on it,” he snarked, munching on a sweet potato fry.

Fabian pouted theatrically, leaning so far over the back of the sofa that he was surely just shy of tipping it over. Or falling on his face. “Well, will you at least watch a movie with me? Even if you, like, hate my guts or whatever.”

“Yeah. And I don’t hate your guts. Fish much?” Riz teased, standing up and shrugging off his silky maroon jacket – the one Fabian had given him after they moved out of their freshman dorm – to hang it on the chair. He knew Fabian would share the flannel blanket if he pestered him enough.

“I don’t need to fish. I know the truth. You’re obsessed with me, because I’m totally amazing and the greatest best friend of all time!”

“Yeah, yeah,” Riz groused, climbing over the back of the sofa and depositing himself next to Fabian. “Which movie are we watching, O Great One?”

“I was thinking an action flick.” Fabian dutifully lifted an arm for Riz to curl under, bundling himself in an extra swath of blanket. “Hey, don’t use up the whole blanket!”

“I’m not! This blanket is huge. We could fit, like, three more people under here.”

Fabian stuck his tongue out at him.

Riz stuck his tongue out back. “And I’m tired of action flicks. We watch those all the time. What about a romance? Fig has a bunch of those from when she was going through her costume design phase.”

Fabian loosened his hoodie drawstrings, shifting to find a more comfortable position on the sofa. “I’d be okay with a romance,” he said quietly.

(Spring) (Freshman Year)

Riz hated it when Fabian didn’t clean the dorm bathroom. He absolutely hated it. There were silvery hairs all over the floor, and unidentified stains on the counter, and the trash was overflowing with empty containers, and there was a truly bizarre smell emanating from the medicine cabinet and even Riz’s righteous anger wasn’t enough to overcome his fear of investigating what it was.

The truth is that it was just poor timing, really. He already felt… stretched thin. Being away from home was exhausting, and he knew it was almost time to go back to live with his mom for spring break but the five days until then felt like five years, and he was so sick of homework and doing his own laundry and grocery-shopping and being intimidated by bloodrush players and feeling like he wasn’t going to enough parties and worrying about his grades and having to pretend like he enjoyed being independent when more than anything, he just needed a hug. He was tired of feeling like he was one of the only goblins around, especially. Being visibly Different wasn’t so heavy but the weight wore him down over time. And maybe he just missed his mom. Really badly. And his dad too, but that part wasn’t new.

“Fabian!” he yelled, because if he didn’t yell he was probably going to cry and he really didn’t feel like crying in front of Fabian right now.

“What,” Fabian snapped, yanking his headphones down around his neck and pushing his swivel chair back.

Fabian’s dismissive tone only amplified his bad mood. Didn’t Fabian care about the bathroom at all? Didn’t he know? (Riz was finally beginning to understand what it was like to be his mom.)

“You haven’t cleaned the bathroom. You were supposed to do it, like last week. It’s disgusting in there, dude.”

Fabian fixed him with a glare. “Okay, first of all, Riz, it’s not ‘disgusting’. I’ll take out the trash tonight. And second of all, I have a lot of shit on my mind right now, so can you like, back the fuck off?”

“Well, maybe I have a lot of shit on my mind right now too!”

“What, like harassing me because I left my toothpaste on the counter instead of putting it in a goddamn drawer? Sorry for ruining your life, I guess.” Fabian spun around and hunched over his laptop, resolutely ignoring Riz.

Riz felt a lump swelling in his throat. “Can you just – Can you stop being so fucking awful! For once!”

“Can you stop being so freaked out about the bathroom? You’re the one who’s being –” Fabian broke off as Riz smacked his hands over his own face, heart pounding with embarrassment as he felt hot tears prickling in his eyes.

“Hey – The Ball? Are you – are you good?”

Fabian’s voice had softened. But Riz was still mad at him. He spun around and shut himself in the bathroom, slamming the door behind him. He stood in there for a few moments, taking deep breaths. The smell in here wasn’t actually that bad. Maybe he’d just live in here forever and never speak to Fabian ever again.

He heard a quiet knock at the door. “The Ball… I’m sorry for yelling at you. I wasn’t actually upset at you. I was upset about… other shit.”

Riz sighed heavily. A very vocal part of him wanted desperately to stay locked up in here and punish Fabian for snapping at him. But a more soft-spoken, more mature part of him reminded him that the grown-up thing to do would be to just tell Fabian the truth. Which was that he was really upset about other shit, too. And taking it out on Fabian. Who was his best friend. His sweet, caring, good-natured best friend who didn’t take out the trash as often as he should and sometimes expressed his generalized bad feelings by being rude to Riz, but Riz did that to him, too, and he also didn't sweep the floor as often as he should, so he had no moral high ground to stand on.

Reluctantly, he unlocked the door and peered at Fabian, hurriedly wiping his eyes on his hoodie sleeve. He was also wearing Fabian’s hoodie, he realized – Fabian had let him borrow it a couple months ago for a reason neither of them could now remember and he just hadn’t bothered giving it back. They were close like that. Which made it even stupider that they’d just been arguing about the fucking bathroom.

“I’m sorry for yelling at you, too,” Riz mumbled. “And I’m not upset at you. I’m just upset about… other shit.”

The corner of Fabian’s mouth quirked, even though he still looked sad. “I hate when we fight.”

“We were literally fighting for like, ten minutes max.”

“It was a shitty ten minutes.”

Riz shrugged, smiling despite himself. “Yeah.”

Fabian’s smile grew just slightly. He looked relieved. “Hug it out?”

Riz opened his arms and Fabian dutifully picked him up. Burying his nose in Fabian’s shoulder, Riz took comfort in the familiar way Fabian smelled. His best friend, whom he could never stay mad at.

Fabian set him back on the floor and Riz tilted his head, looking up at him. “Will you actually clean the bathroom, though?”

Fabian sighed, shoving his hands in the pockets of his joggers. “Yeah. I will. But tomorrow, okay? I just – I’m not up to it right now.”

“Do you feel like telling me about the shit?”

“I will later. What about your shit?”

“I miss my mom.”

Riz was surprised at how saying it out loud felt like releasing a breath he’d been holding. And that was all it boiled down to, really, when he put it into words. He just missed her, very simply and terribly.

Fabian hugged him again. “Wanna watch a movie? I just downloaded a new action flick.”

They curled up on Fabian’s bed – it was the lower bunk so there was more space for the two of them, and Fabian had also made a pillow nest in the corner with throw cushions he’d ‘borrowed’ from Seacaster Manor. They watched an action flick. And then they watched another action flick. By the end of the second movie, the sun had gone down outside the window and the room was almost completely dark, and Riz’s eyelids were heavy as he rested his head on Fabian’s chest, listening to his steady heartbeat.

“Hey, The Ball? Are you still awake?”

“Mmm.”

“Can I tell you about my shit?”

“Mmm.”

“Do you promise not to tell anyone?”

“Mm-hmm.”

Fabian took a deep, shaky breath. Riz’s head lifted slightly as his chest rose and fell with it. And then Riz lifted his head a little more to see Fabian better, because he still hadn’t said anything. The room was dark, but with Riz’s Darkvision he could make out the anxious expression on Fabian’s handsome face.

“I think I like guys,” Fabian said.

Riz felt his heart swell with fondness.

“That’s great, Fabian. Were you worried I wouldn’t be cool with it?” Something occurred to him. “Wait, you, like… know I’m gay, right? I mean, I feel like I’ve made it pretty obvious but maybe –”

Fabian shook his head, the hand on Riz’s back patting him placatingly. “No, it’s not like that. I do know you’re – yeah. I wasn’t worried about any of my friends not being cool with it. It was more just… I’m coming to terms with it. It’s… new.”

Riz nodded understandingly, resting against Fabian’s shoulder. “So, do you think you like guys exclusively, or…?”

Fabian bit his lip. “I’m not sure. It’s hard to tell, right now. I mean, I dated Aelwen, but it’s hard to figure out if… I mean, so much of that relationship was about me trying to prove to myself that I was, like, this version of myself that I wanted to be. So it’s hard to figure out if I was like, actually genuinely into her as a person. It’s all… confusing.”

Riz nodded. He could definitely understand. Pretty much everything about romance and sexuality in general confused him, so most of the time he did himself the favor of simply not thinking about it. “It’ll become clear eventually,” he said to Fabian. (And to himself.)

“Yeah,” Fabian said. “Thanks, Riz,” he said softly, squeezing Riz against his side.

Riz laughed breathlessly. “Not so hard! You’re gonna choke me!”

“Ooh, kinky.”

Riz whacked him with a pillow as Fabian laughed hysterically.

“You’re the worst, you know that?” Riz informed him, still laughing.

Fabian snickered, grappling Riz so he couldn’t keep throwing pillows. “Um, no, I’m the best and you love me.”

He was. And Riz did.


	2. Boy Talk

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow an update?? In the Today??? It's more likely than you think
> 
> (Also, I forgot to mention that this theoretically takes place post-canon, but also future canon content might render it definitely non-canon-compliant, so you can also just think of it as an AU? Schrodinger's Canon Divergence)

(Present Day)

Ellic was a guy in Riz’s Wizardry for Non Magic Majors class – okay, sue him, he’d put off his last five credits of arcana requirement until the absolute final quarter of senior year. He was in there with a bunch of half-casters and non-casters who were also mostly seniors, and pretty much everyone was struggling to stay afloat because their brains weren’t hardwired to absorb even the most basic packaging of arcane theory. Ellic’s presence had been helpful to Riz, really. He’d messaged him on the weird homework app that all the university students had on their crystal, asked him questions about lecture and helped him figure out the answers to others, and they’d even met up to study at the library a few times. Ellic always bought him coffee. He was really nice.

“That guy was totally hitting on you,” Fabian remarked, sounding somewhat scornful.

Riz arched an eyebrow. “Who? Ellic?”

They were sitting in the cafeteria (the good one, not the shitty one), splitting a club sandwich. It was more like a 60/40 or maybe even a 70/30 split, because Riz’s stomach was much smaller than Fabian’s. This was one of their rituals; when they ate lunch together, they ordered just the right amount of food to share. It had been at least two years since they’d had class schedules that allowed them to eat lunch together on campus during the week, though. It was a pleasant change. Seeing Fabian during the middle of the day gave Riz that extra energy boost he needed to push through his Tuesday afternoon courses.

Ellic didn’t appear to have a break around this time, but he’d swung through the cafeteria to refill his tea thermos and had spotted Riz and stopped to say hi. Fabian hadn’t taken much of a shine to him, it seemed.

“Yeah, him,” Fabian said, sounding like he was talking about the overflowing dumpster behind Riz’s apartment building. “He’s, like, SO obviously into you. You can’t see it?”

Riz shook his head, chewing on a bite of sandwich. He swallowed and took a sip of Fabian’s mango juice. (Another ritual: they each ordered a different juice and shared them so they could both try two flavors.) “I think you’re wrong, dude. He’s just a friend from class. I mean, why do you think he’s into me?”

Fabian reached over and took a sip of Riz’s strawberry juice. “It’s the way he looks at you,” he said archly, straw poking out of the side of his mouth. “He’s, like, enamored.”

“Ooh, ‘enamored’, big fancy word,” Riz said, smirking and rolling his eyes. “I think you’re full of shit and you have no idea what you’re talking about. You don’t know this guy. I do. And he does not seem into me.”

Fabian threw a grape at Riz, who swerved to catch it in his mouth. “I’m telling you!” Fabian said irritably. “I can see it in his eyes. You just don’t believe me because you don’t realize how attractive you are.”

Fabian’s expression didn’t change, but his eyes suddenly became fixed on the green seat upholstery to the left of Riz’s head and his hand paused midway to lifting his glass toward his mouth, as if he’d been frozen in time.

Riz himself felt a little frozen in time. Did Fabian really just say that? It’s a normal thing for friends to say, he reminded himself. Fig and Adaine and Kristen were always telling him – and each other – how sexy they all were. Well, Adaine specifically was more often the recipient than the provider of this kind of commentary, but the point remained that it was ordinary for friends to remark on each other’s physical beauty and gas each other up. Fabian was just doing that very, very, very ordinary thing. It was only Riz’s stupid heart that was reacting all weirdly to it because it was dedicated to the task of capitalizing on any vague indication that Fabian might share any of the… non-ordinary-friend feelings he’d been experiencing lately. He was the real ‘enamored’ one, he thought to himself with a bittersweet humor.

“Well… thank you,” Riz said slowly as Fabian twisted around to aggressively clear his throat into the crook of his elbow.

Before either of them could say anything else, Ellic reappeared at the table. “Hey, um… hi,” he said breathlessly, tucking a loose lock of hair behind his ear.

“Hey there,” Riz said, pasting on a bland smile. He liked Ellic, but he didn’t like him enough to be interested in having more than one conversation per day.

Fabian just glared at him and munched on a piece of lettuce, resembling a grumpy rabbit. Riz barely contained a giggle and gently kicked Fabian’s foot under the table, hoping he’d take the hint to act more personable.

“’Kay, so this is so dumb, but when I came by earlier it was actually to ask you on a date, but then I chickened out,” Ellic said, smiling nervously as he fiddled with one of his backpack straps. “But then I resolved myself to just come back and do it, you know?”

Riz pointedly ignored the peripheral sight of Fabian rolling his eyes. And he also ignored the thought of the speech he would surely be subjected to in a few minutes about how Fabian was always right about everything all the time.

“Well… how nice,” Riz replied stiffly, still wearing a smile that he hoped looked reasonably pleasant. Nobody had ever taught him how to appropriately react when someone asked him on a date. It had certainly been a while since he’d had the chance to practice. He’d been asked out before, at least a couple of times, but no particular occasion was recent or memorable enough to easily come to mind.

Ellic beamed, hazel eyes twinkling. “So, then… would you wanna get some coffee or something, maybe? Like, this weekend?”

Fabian muttered ‘basic’ under his breath and Riz kicked him again. “I would love to,” he said, flashing his most charismatic smile at Ellic. Partly to annoy Fabian. And partly because… the whole ‘dating culture’ thing had never really clicked for him before, and deep down he knew that it probably never would, but there was a little voice in his head that liked to suggest that maybe he just hadn’t gone on a date with the right stranger yet.

If Riz was completely honest with himself, Ellic probably wasn’t the right stranger. (If such a person even existed, which Riz tended to doubt.) But if anything, spending time with him might serve to get his mind off Fabian, or at least help him channel some of his Weird Fabian Feelings in a different direction. And that was worth something, wasn’t it?

“Great!” Ellic exclaimed, fist-pumping. (Out of the corner of his eye, Riz saw Fabian pretend to retch.) “Well, I’ve gotta get to class, but I have your number, so I’ll text you, yeah?”

Riz hummed in affirmation, waving blithely as Ellic backed away and then spun and darted out the door. Wood elves were rather dexterous; Ellic did have that going for him. Hopefully he’d date someone someday who’d appreciate that quality. Riz already sensed with a sort of resigned acceptance that that person wouldn’t be him. Oh, well. At least he understood these things about himself at this point in his life, he thought wryly.

It occurred to him that he’d never actually directly given Ellic his number; he must’ve found it somehow through the homework app. That was a little stalker-y. Maybe Riz wasn’t missing out on much after all.

Fabian, meanwhile, looked like he’d been hit over the head with a whack-a-mole hammer.

Riz stared at him, slurping the dregs of his strawberry juice through his straw. “What’s with you?”

“You’re going on a date with him?” Fabian asked incredulously.

Riz frowned. “Yeah, why not? Aren’t you happy for me?”

“I mean, of course I –”

“And why are you so surprised, anyway? You kept saying he was into me. And you were talking about how attractive I am, like, two minutes ago,” Riz pointed out with a smirk.

Fabian’s eyes widened and he began sputtering incoherently. Riz tossed his head back and laughed, popping another grape in his mouth.

(Summer) (Post Freshman Year)

Final exams were – finally – over, and dusty beams of sunlight streamed into Riz and Fabian’s cramped dorm room as they busied themselves haphazardly emptying their desk drawers into cardboard boxes. They were supposed to vacate by mid-afternoon tomorrow, and they’d both characteristically put off packing for as long as possible.

Fabian was humming the theme song to the elvish soap opera he pretended to hate. He was bouncing his hips and practically prancing around the room, month-old piercings glittering in his ears.

“Someone’s in a good mood,” Riz remarked with a smile after watching Fabian flip and catch his desk lamp and then bow to an imaginary audience.

Fabian winked at him and did a twirl. The flannel tied around his waist lifted as he spun and whipped the back of his desk chair.

“What’s going on? Are you just happy about the end of school?” Riz asked, neatly folding a hand towel.

“It’s a secret,” Fabian whispered conspiratorially.

Riz tried valiantly to contain a laugh. “Okay, I mean, you don’t have to –”

“Okay, fine, I’ll tell you: I met a guy!” Fabian burst out loudly.

Riz’s hands stopped folding. He felt… weird all of a sudden. Like he was nauseous, but the nausea had appeared ludicrously fast and seemingly out of nowhere, and also the sunlight now looked like it was slightly the wrong color, and Fabian’s voice sounded like it was coming from a different room.

“What? …Who?” Riz asked automatically. He felt like someone else was talking out of his mouth. Okay, so this was strange. What the hell was going on with him?

“Remember when I decided to try going to the Queer Student Union last week? Well, he was there – this, like, buff, hairy, dwarven guy – and he asked for my number, and he’s been texting me all week, and he says he’s doing some study abroad thing in the Mountains of Chaos over the summer but he wants to ‘keep in touch and see what happens in September’ and The Ball, he’s just so cute, like he’s a junior – well, a senior now, I guess – and he rides a motorcycle –”

“You ride a motorcycle,” Riz pointed out, still feeling like he’d somehow cast Blink without noticing.

“I know! But it’s hot when other guys do it. Anyway! I’m just so excited, ‘cause this is the first guy that I’ve ever, like, actually had a thing with, I guess, and it’s like, wow, I’m finally, like, coming into my own as a gay person –”

“That is exciting!” Riz interrupted.

“Yeah, it is,” Fabian said, giving Riz a weird look. “So, anyway, he’s a warlock majoring in Warlock Studies, and his patron is –”

Fabian continued to ramble about the dwarven guy, dancing around the room all the while. Riz tried his best to pay attention, but he was having trouble concentrating on the words. He’d given up on effectively packing right now after noticing that the only thing he’d accomplished over the past several minutes was unfolding and refolding the exact same hand towel.

What was wrong with him? Why wasn’t he happy for his best friend? Was he jealous that Fabian had a thing with a guy and Riz didn’t have anything going on in his love life? Was he worried that he was falling behind in the arbitrary timeline of Gay Coming-of-Age Milestones? Was he afraid that Fabian would stop hanging out with him if he got a boyfriend? Was he grieving the reality that his best friend was now involved in an experience that Riz inherently couldn’t share with him?

It was probably a little bit of all of those things, if Riz was really honest with himself. But there was something… else. He couldn’t put his finger on it. The confusion was frustrating, and the more frustrated he got the harder it was to listen to what Fabian was saying, and the less he listened the more frustration he felt towards himself for not giving his best friend the attention he deserved.

Things like this would become clear eventually, right? As he got older? He certainly hoped so.

(Present Day)

“It’s cold as balls out here,” Fabian whined.

“Really? It doesn’t seem that cold to me,” Gorgug mused.

Riz didn’t comment. It was a bit chilly and the wind was brisk, but nothing an average jacket wouldn’t solve.

Fabian’s U Dance Team fleece was definitely protecting him from the elements just fine. Riz knew this for certain because he’d worn it himself on multiple occasions. Fabian had just been in a Complaining Mood over the past few days, and Riz couldn’t figure out why.

Complaining Moods were not out of the norm for Fabian’s emotional landscape. They made him fairly unbearable to be around and were usually the result of underlying bad feelings that had been festering for a while, but they were generally fixable with takeout from Fabian’s favorite Dunefortish restaurant and a binge session of the elvish soap opera he pretended to hate and – if it was an especially gnarly Mood – Riz concocting a homemade face mask out of ingredients he found in Fabian’s kitchen and then carefully smearing it onto Fabian’s face before giving him a manicure. (Riz’s hands were tiny enough to paint delicate little stars and moons on his fingernails.) The things Riz did for his ridiculously high-maintenance best friend. And for, like, love or whatever. (Shut up.)

The thing about Fabian’s typical Complaining Moods, though, is that they only lasted a day at most. This one had gone on for at least three. Which was very abnormal.

Riz’s running theory was that it was lasting this long because Riz hadn’t had a chance to cure it with the takeout / soap opera / spa package. He’d suggested all three things several times, of course, but Fabian kept saying he ‘didn’t feel like it,’ whatever that meant. Riz had never thought he’d see the day when Fabian ‘didn’t feel like’ getting a DIY facial made with stupidly expensive fruits and weird imported honey that Riz was pretty sure you were only legally allowed to eat if your bank account was above a certain sky-high level.

Part of the reason Riz had agreed to doing the Lake Thing was that he’d thought it might cheer Fabian up. Evidently, he’d been wrong.

The Lake Thing was a tradition that had gotten started the way a lot of traditions do: mostly unintentionally. Bastion City was located on the coast, but there was a canal that wrapped around one side of the university campus and connected the seashore to a nearby lake that could be reached via a ten-minute walk through the university arboretum, if you started at the dorm building where Fabian, Riz, and Gorgug had lived in their freshman year. Somehow – and, gun to his head, Riz could never remember how or why they’d started doing this – the three of them had begun the tradition of walking to the lake in the middle of the night to stand on the boat docks and throw stones into the water as a method of celebrating their achievements or – on occasion – honoring sad events.

As far as traditions went, it wasn’t the most elaborate. It didn’t even have an interesting title. They just called it the Lake Thing, which, in Riz’s opinion, sounded like the name of a primeval monster. But the three of them had used it to mark turning points in their lives, both major and minor, and it had become something of a bookend for different phases in their respective college careers.

After freshman year, all three of them had moved out of the dorms and Gorgug had even switched to online classes so he could more easily tour with Fig, but they kept doing the Lake Thing no matter how inconvenient it became to access the lake from their new homes because… it was a tradition. And they kept it to the three of them because Fig, Adaine, and Kristen already had Girls’ Night once a month, and the Lake Thing was the closest their friend group had ever come to having a Boys’ Night. (The fact that Gorgug and Riz and even, sometimes, Fabian all regularly attended Girls’ Night was beside the point.)

Upon finding out that Riz was apparently going on a date for the first time in… a very long time, Gorgug had immediately suggested the Lake Thing. And so here they were. In the middle of the night, under a new moon, wearing sweaters and pajama pants and listening to the ambient sound of frogs croaking and waves lapping against the docks and Fabian grumbling about how his shoes were too small all of a sudden.

Gorgug pulled a rock out of his pocket. (At some point, they’d developed the ingenious idea of collecting rocks in the woods along the way to the lake and keeping them in their pockets.) “Here’s to Riz putting himself out there and meeting new guys,” he said solemnly. And then lobbed the rock. It landed in the water with a distant splash.

Riz unzipped the pocket of his windbreaker and pulled out a rock of his own. “Here’s to… uh, yeah, that. What Gorgug said.” He lobbed the rock. It landed in the water with a considerably less distant splash.

He didn’t have the heart to mention his ambivalence about the date. Ellic had been texting him on and off for the last three days, and he was a nice enough guy. Not an overwhelmingly interesting guy, but a nice one. There was just no… spark. There was rarely spark, for Riz, with guys that he didn’t already know very well in a friendship capacity. There hadn’t been any spark, come to think of it, for quite a while with anyone except… well. The person he knew best in a friendship capacity.

Fabian pulled his own rock out of his pocket and lobbed it, hard, into the water. It landed with an aggressive splash.

“Don’t you have a toast, Fabian? You’re supposed to have, like, a toast,” Gorgug pointed out.

Fabian stared at him uncomprehendingly for a moment, and then seemed to come to his senses. “Oh, yeah. My toast is, uh, the same as what you guys said.”

“You should come up with a different one,” Riz said.

“If I have to, then so should you,” Fabian snapped.

Riz folded his arms. “What’s going on with you?”

“Yeah, are you all right, Fabian?”

Fabian stared at both of them for a moment with a challenging expression, like he was about to really tell them off. And then he appeared to sort of… deflate a bit. He hung his head and slowly sank into a seated position on the wood slats of the dock. Riz and Gorgug carefully sat down next to him, Riz wobbling slightly as the dock rocked with the motion of the water.

“I don’t know what’s going on with me. I’m sorry, guys,” he said dejectedly.

Any irritation Riz had been feeling towards him instantly evaporated. He scooted over next to Fabian and wrapped his arms around him – well, as much of him as he could feasibly wrap his short arms around. Fabian leaned into him automatically. “It’s okay, Fabes,” he told him tenderly. “We all have bad days sometimes. Bad weeks. I mean, you’ve been acting like a real pain in the ass lately, but at least you’re aware of it.”

“Thanks, you’re a real comfort,” Fabian said with a note of sarcasm, but he reached up and gently squeezed Riz’s wrist anyway.

Suddenly they were both enveloped by Gorgug’s arms. “I love you guys!”

“We love you too, Gorgug,” they replied in unison.

“Do you guys wanna just call it a night? It is pretty cold out here.” Riz didn’t actually think it was cold. But he sensed that Fabian wanted to go home, and he wasn’t especially invested in their ‘celebration’ anyway.

“Are you sure, Riz?” Gorgug asked.

“Yeah. I’m sure. C’mon, guys.”

Gorgug picked Riz up and carried him on his shoulders back through the woods. When they reached campus and Gorgug split off to head back to the house he shared with Zelda and a few of her friends, Riz linked his arm through Fabian’s for the walk home. Fabian lived by himself in a lush studio apartment, but it was only a couple blocks away from Riz, Fig, and Adaine’s place, which was why he showed up there practically every day.

Riz pinched Fabian’s bicep to get his attention. “Ow,” Fabian muttered, not sounding like he was in very much pain.

“I think that Dunefortish place is still open. Wanna get some takeout and watch ‘Elf is for the Way You Look at Me’?”

“I hate that show.”

“No, you definitely don’t.”

“I do!”

“Okay, maybe I’ll just watch it by myself then…”

“No, uh… You don’t have to – I mean, I’ll –”

Riz grinned. “’Kay, sounds like a plan. We can go to your place, right? I just don’t want Adaine to get pissed at us for watching TV while she’s trying to trance.”

“Yeah, sure. And do you wanna, uh…”

“I’ll make a face mask. Maybe I’ll even use it on myself too, this time. Can I sleep over, though?”

“Yeah. Couch is all yours.”

“Great.”

Riz’s hand was still touching Fabian’s arm, but Fabian reached over with his other hand to squeeze it. Even in the dark, Riz could see him smiling.

Complaining Mood cured.

(Winter) (Sophomore Year)

“It’s cold as balls out here,” Fabian whined.

Riz flashed him a sympathetic look. He felt partially responsible for Fabian’s discomfort because Fabian had loaned him his warmest wool-lined jacket. It was the only garment guaranteed to protect its wearer from Bastion City’s icy February winds.

And being by the lake didn’t help. The cool breeze coming off the waves chilled to the bone.

Gorgug, Fabian, and Riz had come out here to do the Lake Thing as a tribute to the demise of Fabian’s first queer relationship. They’d spent the last hour listening to Fabian ranting about how thoughtless and ‘emotionally closed-off’ his ex-boyfriend had been, throwing a rock into the water each time Fabian either said his name or used an acidic expletive in place of his name. (They’d had to go back to the shore three times to find more rocks.)

And now Fabian had finally, apparently, exhausted himself, and was just complaining about more general things like the weather.

He sat heavily down on the dock, resting his forearms on his knees, and Riz and Gorgug followed, each positioned about a foot away from him. They both watched him intently in that nervous way you did when your friend was really sad about something you couldn’t directly relate to and you didn’t know how to fix it.

Riz wanted to fix it. He hated seeing Fabian this miserable. But he knew it was the sort of pain that faded only with time.

(He wasn’t looking forward to waiting for months for Fabian’s smile to return.)

“It just sucks extra that Valenthendriel’s Day is coming up and we didn’t even stay together long enough for me to get a present,” Fabian mumbled, resting his chin on his forearms.

Riz hummed in empathy, rubbing his back.

“Me and Zelda are going on a date to Waterfall Island for Valenthendriel’s Day. You can come with us! I bet Zelda will be cool with it –”

Riz leaned around Fabian’s back and shook his head at Gorgug, who got the hint and trailed off into silence.

Fortunately, Fabian didn’t seem to have been paying much attention to begin with. “The other thing that really fucking sucks about it is that this was my first relationship with a guy, and… I don’t know. I guess I thought it was gonna be, like, really amazing, and like prove to me that being with guys is really the right thing for me.”

Riz sighed and continued rubbing his back. “Relationships with guys are still just… relationships.”

“And men are dogs,” Gorgug said mournfully, patting Fabian’s shoulder.

Riz couldn’t help but snicker at that. And then he snickered a little more. And then Fabian’s lips started twitching, and pretty soon they’d both burst out laughing, and Gorgug didn’t seem to get the joke but he looked happy that he’d made them laugh.

When they calmed down a little bit. Fabian smiled wanly and ran a hand through his hair. “Do you think that means I’m over the breakup? That I can laugh about things again?”

Riz gave a sad shake of his head. “You probably won’t be over it for a while. I mean, not to like, sound discouraging or whatever, but give yourself time to heal.”

“Yeah, don’t push yourself to get over it too fast.”

Fabian nodded, staring at the thin crescent moon up above. “Do you think I’ll ever have a good relationship with a guy?”

“I’m sure you’ll marry a guy,” Gorgug said, sounding certain. “I mean… if that’s what you want.”

“I think I do want that.” Fabian’s voice was soft. Riz’s heart ached.

And then Fabian let out a shaky laugh and rested his forehead on his arms. “Being gay sucks sometimes, though. Men suck.”

“Cheers to that.” Riz flipped a pebble into the water. Then he ruffled Fabian’s hair. “But hey. Chin up.”

Fabian lifted his chin up, looking at Riz. His eyes reflected the silver moonlight.

Riz would do anything for him. His beautiful best friend. “Being gay is also the best. I’d hate to be straight,” he told him. “And one of these days you’re gonna be dating some fantastic-ass guy, and you’re gonna be like, ‘I’m so glad I’m gay.’”

Fabian chuckled. “That’s the dream.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading! I plan on having the next chapter posted within the week. See you then <3


	3. Rain Check, Pt. 1

(Summer) (Post Sophomore Year)

‘I just need to go explore the world and find myself,’ Fabian had said. ‘I’ll be gone all summer and come back a new man,’ he’d said. ‘I’ll try to call you but there won’t always be good crystal data,’ he’d said.

Okay. Fine. Whatever. Riz was chill. Totally chill.

Riz himself had nabbed a paid summer internship at the Bastion City Times, so he was spending June, July, and August in the apartment he shared with Fig and Adaine. Except minus Fig and Adaine. Fig and Gorgug were away on a summer music festival tour – she’d gone on and on for weeks about this artist collective she was supposed to visit that was famous for its handmade novelty candles which had ‘sexual magic properties’ (Riz hadn’t bothered asking her to elaborate). Adaine, Kristen, and Tracker were all spending most of their time at Mordred Manor; Adaine only occasionally popped back in to water her plants and make sure Riz wasn’t ‘destroying the kitchen’ in her absence.

Riz wasn’t ‘lonely,’ per se. Loneliness was nothing new to him. It was an old friend. He felt natural, comfortable even, in its presence.

But he was… lonesome, perhaps. He didn’t need company, but he wanted it.

Not lonely. A little lonesome.

His days sort of blended together, in the way the dog days of summer tend to. In the mornings he walked to his internship, messenger bag slung over his shoulder, brilliant sunlight washing out the pavement. Once he arrived and clocked into work he passed the next several hours doing menial tasks in the warm-gray shadow of shaded windows and the oppressive hum of the indoor fan – copy-editing, fetching coffee for higher-ups, pretending to copy-edit, fetching extra coffee for himself. Every weekday around five he clocked out and walked home in the blazing late-afternoon heat, humidity curling his hair and making his shirt stick to his back. When he got home he typically laid on the sofa for an hour or two, too exhausted to move. Sometimes he watched re-runs of ‘Elf is for the Way You Look at Me.’ In the evening he went for walks, sometimes to do laundry or buy groceries and sometimes just to breathe in the cool twilight air. He showered before bed and called or received a call from one of his friends. Usually Adaine. Sometimes Kristen or Fig. Occasionally Gorgug. Rarely Fabian.

Fabian sent him letters, though. They arrived every couple of weeks – more often than Riz sent them back – battered and beat-up with the corners worn and the stamps peeling, clearly having traveled across hundreds of miles of foreign land and sea, detailing events that had likely occurred in Fabian’s life about a month ago.

They were nice, though. Fabian really did have exquisite penmanship. Riz read them and re-read them and re-read them again, and then he folded them neatly, tied them together with string or ribbon if he could find any, kept them in a shoebox in his room – he felt a bit like a war bride sometimes.

The crazy thing was that he found himself imagining Fabian was there. Not necessarily always saying anything – even just sitting or standing next to him, acknowledging him. Being with him. Fabian curled up on the other end of the couch while he watched ‘Elf is for the Way You Look at Me’, laughing along and feigning a solely ironic interest in the plot. Fabian walking with him on the way home from work, commenting on the paint color of the tacky condos they passed. Fabian following him through the aisles of the grocery store. Fabian watching him, chin in hand, seated at the kitchen table as he made broke-college-kid stirfry. Fabian lazily half-dancing to the radio as they brushed their teeth, side-by-side in the mirror. Fabian conked out on the sofa cushions when he left for work in the morning.

But Fabian wasn’t actually there, and pretending only seemed to make that more obvious. Riz wished he could stop pretending. Most of the time, it just happened automatically.

There were other interns at the Bastion City Times. Most of them were only acquaintances he felt entirely neutral towards and probably wouldn’t be able to pick out of a line-up after the summer was over. There were a couple he actively disliked. There were a few he got along well with. One in particular – Deven, a violet tiefling who dyed his hair platinum. Riz liked platinum hair.

Out of all the other interns, Deven was the most motivated to hang out with Riz. He messaged him asking if he was free this weekend, did he have any music recommendations, did he wanna grab lunch from the café tomorrow, did he wanna drink cold cider on the beach tomorrow night there’s a full moon it’s really cool, did he want any music recommendations, did he have a boyfriend, was he free this weekend?

Riz listened to his music. Went to lunch. Drank cold cider on the beach under the full moon. He was lonesome, and Imaginary Fabian didn’t make for great company because he only said things that Riz thought of first.

Fabian didn’t seem lonely, or lonesome – his letters described his motley array of pirate crewmates, the eccentric characters he met in harbors, the cute guys who approached him in taverns, cute girls even. There was a water genasi who’d told him she’d marry him if he moved to her city. He wrote that he was still figuring out his precise sexual orientation, and summer was a time for exploration, wasn’t it?

Reading about that water genasi annoyed Riz for reasons he, frustratingly, couldn’t articulate, and his mood was off-kilter for the rest of the day, and maybe that was why he agreed to let Deven take him out on the lake in a rowboat at sunset – maybe that would make him feel better. Sunsets were nice, the lake was nice. Deven was nice. (Nice enough.)

Kissing Deven was… nice enough. Riz didn’t exactly have anything to compare it to. He just wanted to see what it was like. Try it on for size. He and Deven weren’t dating, not really – it felt like a romance practice-round for Riz. They went on not-dates and then they real-kissed. They did things that some people would count as sex. Deven said he liked him, and Riz danced around answering. Deven asked if they could stay in touch after the summer. Riz danced around answering.

Summer was a time for exploration, wasn’t it?

The thing was that even when he wasn’t picturing Imaginary Fabian standing next to him, Imaginary Fabian was still in his head. Even when he was kissing Deven, or… doing things with Deven. He tried to banish Imaginary Fabian because he wanted to give Deven his full attention. But the further thing was… he noticed after some careful data collection that he enjoyed kissing Deven more when he was thinking about Fabian. And that was, perhaps, the weirdest realization of the summer.

And it was also the reason he ended up declining Deven’s invitation to keep ‘seeing each other’ during the school year. It just wouldn’t be fair to him, would it?

Riz had some serious reflecting to do.

(Present Day)

An April storm raged outside. The neighborhood power had gone out half an hour ago but luckily the Bad Kids were prepared – Fig’s ridiculously extensive candle collection came in handy at times like this, and Adaine had stocked the kitchen with enough produce that they could make a reasonably filling salad dinner without having to use the oven to cook. Girls’ Night was saved after all.

Riz was curled up on the sofa of his apartment, Kristen’s legs in his lap, watching the rain lash against the dark windowpanes. Fig had found a collection of novelty penis-shaped candles a while ago when she was doing a music festival in some weird artist collective, and she’d placed them in front of all the windows as ‘a beacon of hope for the masses.’ The nearest one was electric blue, and the label on the stand read that burning it was supposed to magically bring ‘thoughtful sex’ into the lives of the household members.

“What’s ‘thoughtful sex?’” Riz mused. “Like, what does that mean?”

“It means you’re thinking really deep thoughts while you’re having sex,” Fig informed him as she poured white wine in his glass. “Like, you’re like, ‘ooh baby, fuck me harder, the construction of self is a mirror through which we can understand and process our perceptions of other beings, cum all over me!’”

Adaine made a face. “Wouldn’t it mean sex where you’re being very thoughtful and considerate of your partner’s wants and needs? That’s what I would assume. Hey Kristen, scoot over.”

Kristen sat up from the couch cushions long enough to make room for Adaine, and then she immediately slumped back over Adaine’s lap.

“Isn’t that how all sex should be?” Gorgug asked as he set the massive salad bowl on the coffee table.

“I don’t know, I feel like I – I mean, some people – get off on their partner, like, being really rough and only caring about their own desires. Like, that can be hot,” Kristen said.

“But if they’re doing that because you want them to, then they’re still being considerate of your desires,” Adaine pointed out.

There was a knock on the door and Fig skipped over to open it. “Oh, hey, Fabian! Dinner’s just about ready.”

Riz automatically perked up and stretched to see the doorway better. And then he schooled his reaction to appear more nonchalant and, you know… normal.

He felt like Kristen had noticed, thought. She was watching him with an odd look in her eyes. He raised an eyebrow at her, but she just made a goofy face and broke eye contact.

“What were you guys talking about?” Fabian asked, shrugging off his raincoat and hanging it on the hook by the door. His hair had gotten all flattened under his hood and he ran his hands through it to tousle it up again. Riz tried very hard not to track the movement.

“Riz was just talking about sex,” Kristen replied casually.

Fabian made a weird face. “Oh – um – that’s, ah – what –”

Riz flicked Kristen’s ankle. “It wasn’t only me, we were all talking about it.”

“Sure, but you were the one who brought it up.”

“Only because of the candle.” Riz pointed at the blue penis candle on the windowsill. Fabian stared at it, looking truly baffled.

“Anyway, we always talk about sex at Girls’ Night, Fabian. You just don’t show up often enough to know that,” Fig said, handing him a glass of wine.

“I’m busy a lot,” Fabian grumbled. “Is there any room left on the couch?”

“No, but you can have the chair,” Adaine said.

“I call the chair!” Fig yelled from the kitchen.

“You can just sit on the rug with me, Fabian,” Gorgug said, patting the spot next to him. “It’s actually really comfy. I always sit here when it’s Girls’ Night.”

“He literally chooses the floor over the couch and the chair. I have no idea why,” Fig said, walking back into the room with a stack of bowls. “Here, everybody help yourselves to some salad. Does anyone want more wine?”

“Ooh, me!” Kristen waved her empty glass in the air like a torch and Adaine snatched it out of her hand, hissing about ‘officially losing your glass privileges if you break a tenth glass’.

As was tradition, Girls’ Night officially began with a lightning-round love-life update from everyone present. Rain rattled from the gutter outside as the three non-single Bad Kids provided summaries of their respective relationships over the past month. Zelda was doing great, as always. Tracker had discovered a weird herb that she and Kristen were going to try smoking next weekend to see if it had any psychedelic properties. Ayda was in the process of developing new data-organizing software for the university library and according to Fig, it was ‘really spicing things up in the bedroom’ – Riz didn’t bother asking what the hell she could possibly mean by that.

“Okay, so now for our single babes,” Fig said, clapping her hands.

“Still fully aro. Still loving it,” Adaine said, tipping her head in a mocking curtsy while the rest of the room cheered.

“How about you, Fabian? Got your eye on anyone lately?” Kristen asked, twisting her head in Adaine’s lap to peer over at where Fabian was pensively picking at fibers in the carpet.

He squinted at her. “No…”

“Okay,” Kristen hummed, shrugging as best she could in a lying-down position.

“What about you, Riz?” Adaine asked, taking a sip of her wine.

Riz felt himself shrinking into the throw pillows. “Um…”

“Did you go on your date this weekend?” asked Gorgug.

“I’m going to get more wine.” Fabian stood up and walked to the kitchen, rolling his shoulders. Riz resolutely Did Not Stare At His Back Muscles.

“I actually cancelled the date,” Riz admitted, feeling slightly embarrassed. As much he wanted to, he could never totally trick himself into believing that he genuinely enjoyed… Normal Courtship Things. Like going on first dates at coffee shops with strangers. And crushing on someone he’d never really talked to. And wanting to fall in love in a general sense, rather than with anyone specific. It was just… first dates were awkward. Coffee shops were boring. And it was hard to imagine giving his heart away to a perfect stranger.

He crushed on people he knew intimately. And he’d never even thought much about falling in love until he’d realized there was someone special he felt uniquely drawn towards… someone who wasn’t Ellic, unfortunately. Someone who was, at the moment, standing stock-still next to the sofa like some kind of weirdo even though he’d just said he was going to the kitchen. Idiot. (Cute idiot.)

“I just wasn’t really… into him. Like that. The guy, I mean. I felt like it wouldn’t be fair to lead him on.”

“And you don’t think you’d like him more if you went on a date with him?” Gorgug asked.

Riz shook his head. “I don’t think so. I don’t do things… in that order. I’m just not built like that.”

“That’s okay, Riz,” Kristen said, stretching to pat him on the arm with a freckled hand. “Was he bummed when you cancelled the date?”

Riz shrugged. It had been hard to gauge Ellic’s reaction, but the tone of his messages had noticeably shifted from friendly to… cordial. Riz supposed it was fair for him to feel disappointed, if that was indeed what was happening. At least he wasn’t being a dick about it.

“I never thought he was that great, anyway,” Fabian chimed in.

“Well, there you go,” Riz said. Fabian grinned at him and it felt like he’d caught sight of a comet.

“I say, good for you for being knowledgeable about your own needs and best interests. That’s more than a lot of us can say,” Adaine remarked. She stared pointedly at Kristen, who was now trying to balance her empty wine glass on her nose.

“Yeah, good for you, The Ball,” Fabian said brightly, reaching over and squeezing his shoulder.

Riz imagined there’d be a sunburn left behind where Fabian’s hand had been.

(Present Day)

“Hey, The Ball.”

“Mmm. Hey. It’s late, you know.”

Riz leaned over to switch on his bedside lamp – it only gave off a soft orange glow, but he still squinted as his eyes adjusted.

He was dressed only in his boxers and one of Fabian’s old U Dance Team shirts, freshly showered, freshly shaven, enchanted contacts in a box in the bathroom. He groped for his spare glasses on the nightstand. The sound of his crystal ringing hadn’t exactly woken him up, but he had been drifting off, and he’d found a perfectly comfortable position in his blankets. Now it was ruined, of course, and he’d have to try to find it again.

There weren’t many people he’d answer the phone for in the middle of the night. Fabian should feel lucky.

“I was just bummed we didn’t get to talk today.”

Riz hummed, switching the lamp back off and putting his glasses away. He was sleepy, and he wanted to lie in his bed in the dark, and if he fell asleep on the phone then that was Fabian’s own fault for calling this late. “We were both super busy.”

“Yeah, I know. It sucked.”

Riz chuckled. “Cling much?”

“Well, I can see I’m not wanted here, so I’ll just –”

“No, no, it’s fine,” Riz amended quickly. Hopefully not too quickly. “It’s just late, is all.”

“You said that already.”

“It keeps getting more true.”

“Well, maybe I just like how your voice sounds when you’re sleepy. It’s all deep and shit.”

“Oh? Like This?” Riz said in a comically deep bass. “This is my real voice, I just hide it all the time because it freaks people out,” he continued as Fabian laughed.

“I didn’t call earlier because I thought you might be too busy to talk to me.”

“Never too busy to talk to you,” Riz mumbled. He needed to watch himself; he had less of a filter when he was tired.

“Okay,” Fabian said softly. Riz could hear him smiling.

He allowed himself a brief moment to bury his face in his pillow. And then he cleared his throat and collected himself. “So anyway. How was your day?”

“Pretty good. I got a job offer for after graduation.”

Riz hummed. “Fabes, that’s fantastic. What is it?”

“It’s, ah… it’s like, a long-term bard-for-hire thing. So, I’d be spending my time traveling with adventuring parties to different locations. For, like, months or years at a time.”

Riz wasn’t awake enough to fully process that, but he still felt his stomach suddenly vanish from his body. “Oh – oh. So you’d be, like… gone.”

Fabian was silent for a moment. “Yeah. I’d be gone.”

Riz wasn’t sure what to say.

Fabian broke the silence. “I mean… it’s not like that’s my only option. There’s plenty of stuff I could do here in Solace. I’ve even gotten a couple of other job offers. It’s just… something to think about.”

Riz hummed noncommittally. He, again, wasn’t awake enough to fully process this, but he could already tell he was going to have stress-dreams about it tonight.

“What do you… I mean, what do you think about it?”

“About the job? For you?”

“Yeah.”

“I mean… what does it matter what I think?”

“I… I just wanna know.”

Riz sighed heavily, rolling over onto his back and staring up at the darkened ceiling. He thought about telling Fabian how badly he wanted him to stay. About how much he needed him around. He thought really hard about it.

“I don’t wanna tell you what to do. Just do what you want and I’ll support you,” he said.

“I wanna know your opinion, though,” Fabian whined.

“It is waaay too late at night for you to be whining at me. Save that shit for tomorrow morning.”

“Does that mean we’re hanging out tomorrow morning?”

“Goddammit, I was joking. But yeah, let’s do it.”

“I’ll make you breakfast.”

“Only if you come over here to do it so I don’t have to get up.”

“I just think it’s so funny how you’re always saying I’M high-maintenance.”

Riz laughed softly. “Are you coming over or not?”

“Yeah, I am. What should I cook?”

“I dunno, let’s figure it out tomorrow. I’m tired.”

“Wait, before you go to sleep… I do actually wanna hear your thoughts about this job, though. That’s the reason I called.”

“You didn’t call just to hear my voice? That stings.”

“Riz, I’m serious.”

Riz shifted in his blankets, reaching up to rub the bridge of his nose. “Well… do you wanna do it?”

“I mean, it’s a great job. Like, do you think… there’s any, uh… reason I should stay? In Solace?”

“I dunno, Fabian, is there?” Riz felt he was quickly losing the level of wakefulness this conversation seemed to require.

“That’s what I’m asking you.”

“Well, it’s your choice,” Riz said, beginning to feel slightly cranky.

“I know it’s my choice – I just want your input.”

“My official input is that you should follow your heart,” Riz said, stifling a yawn. That was a decent, generalized suggestion, wasn’t it? He wasn’t ordering Fabian to stay, technically. But he also wasn’t telling him to go – that would feel like true self-betrayal.

“Follow my heart… okay,” Fabian said thoughtfully, as though he actually considered it helpful advice and not just a mostly meaningless cliché phrase.

“Mm-hmm. Just do that. And everything will be fine.”

“Mm-hmm. Are you falling asleep? It sounds like you’re falling asleep.”

“I might be falling asleep, a bit.”

“You can fall asleep on the phone. I don’t mind.”

“Only if you hang up as soon as you don’t hear me talking anymore. Not all of us have unlimited crystal data, you know.”

“Yeah, yeah. Good night, The Ball.”

It was stupid how his voice made it sound like a pet name. Or maybe Riz was only hearing it that way because he was barely conscious.

“Good night.”

“See you tomorrow, okay? I just learned how to make whipped coffee. I can’t wait to show you, you’re gonna be so impressed.”

“I’m sure I will be.”

Riz drifted off to the sound of Fabian rambling about gourmet coffee grounds. There was worse ambience to fall asleep to, he thought.

(Winter) (Junior Year)

House parties weren’t Riz’s thing. Parties in general weren’t his thing, possibly. He’d known this since he was a freshman in high school, but for some reason he always let Fabian talk him into accompanying him to frat party after kickback after kegger after ‘post-show bash’. And it was always the same: same shitty beer, same music that was so much louder than it was good, same people that he mostly didn’t know interspersed with the occasional classmate from two quarters ago that he hadn’t liked enough to follow on social media.

And after a while Fabian got buzzed enough to slip away to chat up someone attractive near the pong table while Riz rearranged fridge magnets and contemplated making use of the nearest egress window. But he stayed long enough for Fabian to have fun. And then when he eventually found Fabian and dropped pointed hints about how much he missed his cozy bed, Fabian conceded and made a graceful exit, Riz in tow. Whichever of them was tipsier on the walk back to their neighborhood got to sleep over on the other’s sofa. This was their ritual.

This particular party was hosted by a group of Fabian’s dance major friends – their annual ‘winter washout’ – and he’d gotten rowdier than usual because a seemingly unending queue of increasingly hot dancer guys kept asking him to do body shots. Riz had let him have his fun for as long as he could, but eventually he reached his limit. His cozy bed was calling him. (He didn’t even have the energy to stay up late going down true crime research rabbit-holes like he typically did on Friday nights.)

This area of the city was too far for them to walk back to campus, and Fabian was hardly in a state for a trek anyway. Leading his stumbling best friend by the hand, Riz found their way to the nearest bus stop, clambered up the steps into the bus, pickpocketed a few of Fabian’s coins for transit fare, and maneuvered them into a pair of seats near the back, where the harsh yellowy fluorescents illuminated just how ravaged Fabian’s hair looked. Riz took pity on him and reached up to try and fix it. (It was something of a lost cause.)

Fabian swayed slightly with the jerky motion of the bus, his head pushing on Riz’s hand. They were probably a sight to see – Fabian with his mostly unbuttoned shirt, Riz practically climbing into his lap as he struggled in vain to finger-comb his hair so that it wasn’t directly defying gravity. Fortunately, no one but the bus driver was around to see them; they were almost certainly on the latest bus of the night.

Riz felt Fabian’s eyes on him – burning him. He glanced down, lowering himself slightly to better meet Fabian’s gaze.

“What is it?”

Fabian just watched him. With this… look in his eyes. Riz couldn’t parse it, but he just knew he suddenly felt very naked, even though he was wearing two layers of shirts and a heavy denim jacket. He resisted the urge to shrink back and cover himself with his arms. It wasn’t… bad.

Strange, but not bad.

“What? You’re staring.”

Fabian shook his head slightly, as if to clear his senses. “The Ball, have you ever kissed anyone?”

Riz arched an eyebrow, slowly lowering his hand from Fabian’s hair. It was an odd question to ask, especially right now of all times, but he decided to humor him.

“Yeah, I have. Last summer, while you were at sea. Did I never tell you about that?”

Fabian swayed and fell against the seat. Riz reached forward to attempt to button his shirt a few buttons, because he was beginning to look rather obscene.

“With that guy? The one from your internship?”

“Yeah, that guy. Why?”

Fabian really did have quintessential ‘abs of steel,’ Riz thought to himself as he fumbled over a button. He half wanted to feel them, just out of curiosity, but that would be weird. Then again, Fabian seemed to be in a weird mood right now. Maybe he wouldn’t mind.

“I’m mad,” Fabian said softly.

Riz looked up at him, frowning. “That I didn’t tell you? Or that I’m buttoning up your shirt? Because I mean, you really shouldn’t be half-undressed in public, you know, I feel like that’s not a good –”

“I’m mad it wasn’t me. I’m mad I wasn’t your first kiss.”

Riz’s hands stilled. Now that was… different.

“That’s a dumb thing to be mad about,” Riz heard himself say, heart pounding.

Fabian scoffed, lolling his head back and slouching forward, knees braced against the seatbacks in front of them. “Don’t I know it.”

Riz wasn’t sure what to say. This whole situation felt like it was happening in a dream. “I think Kristen was technically my first kiss, actually,” he said. Deflect, deflect, deflect.

Fabian smiled with his eyes closed. “That doesn’t count.” He rolled his head over to fix Riz with that intense stare again. “I bet that kiss with that guy wasn’t very good, either.”

Riz snorted. “Wouldn’t you like to know.”

“I don’t need to,” Fabian said, sitting up. “‘Cause I already know I’d do it better.”

Riz didn’t literally say ‘Oh, my’ out loud, and he didn’t have any tangible pearls to clutch, but spiritually he was clutching his pearls and whispering ‘Oh, my’ as he swooned onto a nearby divan.

He certainly hadn’t been prepared for this kind of energy from his best friend. Especially on the city bus in the wee hours of a Saturday morning in January, while said best friend was partially shirtless and probably sloshed.

“Well, I, uh… I…” Riz stammered, trying to think of something clever to say. He kept drawing blanks.

Fabian grinned, wolfish. Smug bastard.

“You want me to show you?”

Riz’s heart leapt into his throat. He was pretty sure Fabian’s gaze was physically burning him. He forced himself to take deep breaths and remember the situation at hand. “Okay, uh… you’re, like, mad tipsy right now,” he said. (Partly for his own benefit.)

Fabian tilted his head like a sad puppy. A piece of his hair comically flopped over to the other side. “Okay, so…?”

“So I’ll take a rain check. On that, uh… On that. You know.”

“Okay.” The corner of Fabian’s mouth stretched in a smirk, but his tone was soft. Disarmingly soft.

Riz cleared his throat awkwardly.

And realized they’d been riding the bus for several stops too many. He urgently patted Fabian’s shoulder. “Hey, we gotta get off here. We gotta turn around and get on a different bus because we missed our stop.”

“Are you kidding me?” Fabian whined loudly. The bus driver shot them a vexed look.

But he still stood up and followed Riz off the bus and waited with him in the cold January night until they got on the next bus, at which point he fell asleep until Riz shook him awake. And he didn’t mention kissing at all. Maybe he’d forget all about… that moment.

Riz couldn’t decide whether that would disappoint him.

(He thought maybe it would.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> next chapter should be up w/in a week! thank you for reading!!


	4. Rain Check, Pt. 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In which two (2) dumbasses fail Many insight checks

(Present Day)

“The Ball.”

“Mmm.”

“The Ball…”

“Mm-hmm?”

“The Ball – look over here, please. Pay attention to me!”

Riz glanced up from the two nearly-equally-priced bottles of orange juice he’d been examining. One of them was just slightly more expensive, but it also had a just slightly higher volume, and he was trying to do math in his head to figure out which value was better but the problem was that he hadn’t actually taken a math class since freshman year.

“I’m busy picking out orange juice. This is because of you, you know. You’re the one who’s always telling me I need more vitamin C.”

“It’s good for your immune system. And your skin. Come over here.” Fabian waved him over. He stood in front of a shelf of frozen food, resting his weight on one hip, looking stupid hot even in the bright grocery-store lights when he was wearing the comfiest clothes he owned that weren’t visibly pajamas.

“Why don’t you come over here? You always make me go to where you are. You’re so pushy.”

“I’m literally four feet away from you! I need your help choosing one of these.”

Riz had already started walking over, because Fabian definitely was pushy but Riz kind of loved it. “What are you trying to choose between?” he asked, adjusting his glasses.

Grocery shopping was another ritual of theirs. In their freshman year they’d eaten a lot of their meals in the cafeteria but they still routinely made shared trips to the store to pick up snacks and extra staples for Fabian’s mini-fridge, and sometimes if they had the time and energy to plan a special meal in the communal dorm kitchen they’d make a run to buy ingredients and split the cost. Even though they hadn’t lived together for almost three years, the habit had stuck – Riz helped Fabian decide what to put in his cart and Fabian helped Riz remember what was on his list, and so it just sort of became natural to text each other when they were on their way to go shopping to ask if the other felt like coming along.

Their grocery shopping patterns were pretty much synced up at this point, so the answer was usually yes. Plus, if they were both free afterwards they could cook dinner together and watch TV until one of them fell asleep on the other’s couch. Hence the reason they always dressed in outfits they could sleep in when they went to Fantasy Trader Joe’s. There was an ingrained protocol to this. A weekly ceremony.

“Well, there’s chicken dim sum, but there’s also pork dim sum, and then there’s vegetable dim sum –”

“Which vegetables are in the vegetable one?”

“Not sure, I haven’t read the ingredients yet –”

“Here, hold these –”

Riz shoved the two bottles of orange juice into Fabian’s hands and picked up the vegetable dim sum package to examine it closely. “Okay, there’s cabbage, first of all… scallions… carrots… ginger… do you like ginger? I feel like you either love it or you hate it but I can never remember which one it is.”

“Your glasses are cute.”

“Hmm?” Riz glanced up from the ingredient list, pushing a loose curl out of his face.

Fabian bit his lip, suddenly appearing very interested in the label on one of the orange juice bottles. “I said I like your glasses. Did you know this orange juice is from the Dunefort? I didn’t know they grew oranges there, that’s kind of crazy, don’t you think?”

Riz frowned. “You like my glasses? Do you think I should wear them more?”

“I mean, you usually only wear them at night or early in the morning, so I don’t see them that often,” Fabian remarked, now studying the label on the other orange juice bottle.

“Yeah, I’m just wearing them now because I’m staying over at yours and I don’t wanna leave my contacts in your bathroom like I did last time.”

“So those are your pajamas, then, too? That – shirt?”

Riz peered down at his shirt. It was just one of Fabian’s old U Dance Team numbers – soft from dozens of washing machine cycles, faded, a bit oversized on him but not as much as Fabian’s clothes usually were because it had originally been meant to fit tight. “Yeah, I sleep in this a lot. You’ve, like, definitely seen me wearing it before.”

“You have a lot of my old clothes, don’t you?” There was something odd in Fabian’s voice.

“I guess so. A few shirts, some jackets. I think I have one of your winter hats.” Riz squinted at him. He felt like he was missing a key element of this conversation. “Do you… want them back?”

“No, no, it’s fine,” Fabian said quickly. “Anyway, which dim sum should I get?”

“This vegetable one looks pretty good, I guess. You’ll have to get a protein to go with it. Maybe some tofu.”

“I have some at home, I’m pretty sure.”

“It does have ginger in it – I mean, do you like ginger?”

“Yeah. I love it,” Fabian said. He seemed a bit dazed.

“Are you all right?” Riz asked, trading out the dim sum for the two orange juices.

“I’m good. Perfect.” Fabian beamed at him. That smile of his. It definitely glowed brighter than the sun – Riz just wished he had the math skills to prove it with data.

“Okay, weirdo. I think we need to get some food in you.” Riz affectionately patted Fabian’s tummy. Stupid steel abs.

“Do you want these?” Fabian asked, holding up the vegetable dim sum.

“Do I want – I thought they were for you?”

“Well, I was thinking we could both have them for dinner tonight. Do they look good to you? We can always get something else instead.”

Love truly was ridiculous sometimes. Because, for reasons that Riz absolutely could not understand, the idea of Fabian deliberating over which dinner Riz would like and then asking for Riz’s input and then mentioning to Riz that the dinner was supposed to be for him – in that order – was so endearing that Riz could almost physically feel his heart melting. Which didn’t make any sense because Fabian had done plenty of thoughtful things for him before and this one seemed less-than-perfectly planned but there it was. Fabian was just acting like his normal self and Riz was losing his mind in the grocery store all of a sudden.

I want to kiss him so desperately, Riz thought to himself. Granted, he wanted to kiss Fabian most of the time in a general sense. But in this precise moment, it felt extraordinarily urgent. Achingly urgent.

Which was an inconvenient thought to have about your best friend while the two of you were wearing sweatpants in the frozen food aisle.

“That sounds great, Fabian.” He took off his glasses and cleaned them on his shirt to distract himself. And calm down his heart rate. What was going on with him? He really had to get it together. Fabian was just trying to stock up on food for the week – he certainly didn’t need Riz making eyes at him in Fantasy Trader Joe’s at eight pm on a Saturday night.

“Are you sure?”

“Mm-hmm.” Riz pretended like there was an especially stubborn smudge on one of his lenses.

“Okay.” Fabian tossed the package in their shared shopping cart. “Finish picking an orange juice, and then we can self-checkout and head to my place, all right?”

Riz hummed again, already bracing himself for spending the next fourteen or so hours in Fabian’s apartment, Not Kissing Fabian. Shouldn’t be that hard, right? He’d probably done it hundreds of times by now.

We have seriously got to get our shit together, he sternly told his heart.

(Spring) (Junior Year)

It was an unseasonably sunny morning in April. Light poured through the open windows of Riz, Fig, and Adaine’s apartment, the curtains lifting gently in the breeze.

Girls’ Night was typically a dinner event, as one could surmise from its title. But today it was actually Girls’ Brunch – Fig and Gorgug were both away on tour and Fabian was doing some kind of dance intensive all weekend that involved improv exercises and guided meditation and, like, kinetic hypnosis or something, and so the group today was just Adaine, Riz, and Kristen. And Tracker, whom Fig had authorized as her official Girls’ Night proxy. And all four of them liked brunch food, so they’d gathered early in the morning to prepare a fancy quiche and an assortment of hors d’oeuvres.

(The quiche and hors d’oeuvres hadn’t turned out so well, but luckily there was a Baronese restaurant with takeout delivery service just down the street.)

“This tastes better than quiche, anyway,” Adaine said, gesturing with her fork as she sat folded up in their living room armchair, still wearing her fuzzy pajama pants and frog slippers. None of them had changed out of their pajamas that day, including Kristen and Tracker, who had ridden the bus from a different neighborhood that morning.

“I think it just tastes better than our quiche. Quiche in general is good,” said Riz. He made a mental note to try and get better at cooking. Although the bellinis had turned out pretty well – but Kristen deserved most of the credit for that. She was currently trying to get her bartending certification. ‘It’s actually called mixology,’ she liked to say.

“You know, don’t tell them I said this, but it’s actually kind of nice not having the whole group here,” Adaine mused. “It’s so much less loud.”

“Riz, you must be sad your boyfriend isn’t here, though,” Tracker said, her tone sympathetic.

“…What?”

“Babe, he doesn’t have a boyfriend, what are you talking about?” Kristen stage-whispered from Tracker’s lap, which she was using as a pillow.

Tracker’s brown eyes widened. “Oh, I’m so sorry – I thought Fabian and Riz were like, together. Sorry for the mix-up!”

“Babe, you’re so embarrassing, this is why I can’t take you anywhere,” Kristen continued to stage-whisper, patting Tracker’s knee.

Riz shrugged, taking a bite of noodles. “It’s… okay.” He wasn’t offended – just confused as to why anyone would make that mistake.

“I mean, they do like each other, so you were right about that part,” Kristen added.

Riz’s face heated. “What?”

Kristen stared at him. “You like Fabian, right? Am I wrong about that?”

Riz chewed pensively, not answering right away. Luckily, the pressure was removed a moment later when Adaine’s crystal began ringing – it turned out to be Fig, calling because she couldn’t stand the thought of not participating in Girls’ Night even a little bit. Gorgug was with her, of course. And Adaine had been right – having the whole group around did make it louder. Which was a good thing, right now, because it gave Riz time to think.

The thing was that he wanted to tell Kristen she was wrong. But he realized that if he said that... it would feel like a lie. Which meant that… maybe she was… right?

Adaine shot him a concerned glance as she passed her crystal to Kristen and Tracker so they could talk to Fig. ‘You good?’ she mouthed at him.

He nodded and gave her a thumbs-up.

He was good, wasn’t he? He had some things to process, but they were… good things.

Hopefully.

(Present Day)

Riz took a sip of shitty beer, wrinkling his nose at the taste. He kept an eye on Fabian in the crowd, feeling more grateful than ever for his darkvision.

As a senior dance major, Fabian was apparently all but required to attend the ‘spring social’ hosted in a building that wasn’t technically a frat house but was on the same block as frat houses. He didn’t have to stay long, but he had to show his face. He didn’t have to get sloshed, but he had to drink a toast to his fellow soon-to-be graduates. He didn’t have to bring Riz, but he brought Riz anyway because he always brought to Riz to parties and because Riz was completely, irredeemably, utterly hopeless.

Riz was starting to realize, at this point in his life, that maybe part of the reason he hated parties so much was because of how hot Fabian looked when he got dressed to go out. Fabian was a hot guy to begin with. That was just a given. But when he dabbed sparkle on his cheekbones and patted designer aftershave on his stubbly jaw and rolled his sleeves up to the elbow and undid his buttons down to the solar plexus, Riz had a much harder time pretending that Fabian was in his league.

There Fabian was across the room, looking like an actual real-life prince, probably falling in love and/or being fallen in love with by any number of the other sexy dancer guys orbiting around him. (None of whom were as sexy as him, of course.)

And here Riz was, wearing cuffed jeans and old sneakers and the vintage button-down that Fig said made him look like ‘a sexy indie folk singer’. Maybe that was true. But he wasn’t over there with Fabian, was he?

Fabian had said he just needed to ‘make the rounds,’ which meant he needed to greet everyone he knew to prove that he was physically present and then he’d come find Riz when he was ready to leave. Which would be soon – Fabian wasn’t even planning on having more than one drink.

Riz hoped he started greeting people faster. He already felt like getting out of here. And later tonight he and Fabian were supposed to go back to Fabian’s place to make rice-krispy treats in their pajamas and watch the ‘Elf is for the Way You Look at Me’ Solstice Special four months late (okay, fine, he was starting to un-ironically like it too, sue him).

In the meantime, Riz leaned against the peeling paint of the kitchen doorframe, sipping from his red solo cup, trying not to touch his hair after Fig had put so much effort into helping him style it. Attempting to exude an ‘attractive but not approachable’ vibe.

Evidently one of those wasn’t working so well.

“Hey. Is that your boyfriend over there?”

Riz glanced over at the dragonborn who’d materialized next to him. Riz vaguely recognized him from other parties Fabian had brought him to, but he couldn’t place the name. He was about as tall as Fabian and one of his horns had a metal ring around it. He smiled, teeth glinting in the purple light.

Riz half-smiled back. “Who?”

The dragonborn jerked his head at Fabian, who was in the middle of boisterously clapping a sexy dancer guy on the back.

Riz refrained from sighing. “No, that’s my friend.”

“Ah. My bad. I just assumed because you guys arrive to parties together a lot.”

Riz shrugged. He wasn’t sure how to respond to that.

“You look bored,” the dragonborn commented, sidling a step closer.

Riz shrugged again, mildly confused as to why this guy was still talking to him.

“He your ride home?”

“Nah, we walked.”

“You don’t have to wait for him then, yeah?”

Riz arched an eyebrow.

“I could walk you home. If you wanna get out of here early.”

Now Riz was starting to get a read on where this was going. He opened his mouth to respond, although he wasn’t sure yet what he would say.

And then Fabian suddenly appeared at his shoulder, slightly out of breath. “Hey! Why are you drinking that beer? You hate that shit.”

Riz glanced down at the beer. “I mean… it’s all right?”

“No, you hate it,” Fabian said, sounding certain. He was looking directly at the dragonborn guy, eyes narrowed. “Who’s this?”

The dragonborn lifted his beer cup in greeting, expression cool. “Your friend here was bored. I was just keeping him company. Much too cute to be standing over here by himself.”

Riz looked at Fabian’s face and he couldn’t tell what he was about to say, but he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that it would be, first of all, stunningly stupid and second of all, almost certainly get him in trouble. “Well, thanks for the company, but Fabian and I really need to get home, right Fabes?”

“Can I get your number before you go?”

“He doesn’t have a crystal,” Fabian said haughtily.

“Okay! We definitely need to go! Come on, Fabian.” Riz placed a hand on the small of Fabian’s back to push him towards the door.

Once they were out on the quiet street Riz felt like he could breathe again. A spring rain had just let up, and the night air felt cool and freshly washed, the darkness midnight blue as the stars twinkled above the lush treetops. The moon was full enough that Riz could easily see all of Fabian’s bone structure, the planes of his chest, washed in silver.

“Hey, so what was that?” Riz asked, once they’d walked about a block away from the house, silent but for the calls of night birds and the distant rush of city traffic. “You were acting super weird in there. Are you drunk already? Somehow?”

“No, I only had like, half a drink. We were literally there for…” Fabian checked his crystal. “Twenty-five minutes.”

“Okay, so what was the issue, then?”

Fabian scowled. “That guy was totally moving in on you.”

“So?”

“So, I wanted him to leave you alone.”

Riz flashed him a confused glance. “I mean… what does it matter to you if guys hit on me?”

“Well… I guess… it doesn’t. Like… it shouldn’t. There’s no reason.”

“He wasn’t even doing anything – I was fine, really.”

Fabian stopped walking. “Oh, were you… I mean, did you… like him?”

Riz, who hadn’t immediately realized Fabian wasn’t walking next to him anymore, turned back to look at him. He looked a little… lost. Sad, even.

“Well… no. But that’s not my point. I guess you were just trying to help, weren’t you?” He stepped next to him and linked his arm through Fabian’s.

Fabian looked down at him, eyes still a little sad. “I’m sorry, The Ball.”

“It’s totally okay. Don’t worry about it. Like I said, I didn’t even like the guy anyway.” Riz squeezed his forearm, wanting him to stop looking so unhappy. “Did you at least have fun at your last spring social?”

Fabian smiled, the topic change seeming to cheer him up a bit. “Yeah. It’s hard to believe this is really the last one. The first one feels like it happened, like, two weeks ago.”

“But also, like, two decades ago at the exact same time,” Riz laughed. “Remember that one? That was the time Fig came with us and then she got drunk and started looking at pictures of Ayda on her crystal and, like, crying really hard.”

“Oh yeah, I remember. ‘She’s so fucking hot, you guys,’” Fabian imitated a sobbing Fig. Riz cracked up and Fabian shot him a pleased grin.

“And then sophomore year was when Kristen was with us – no, wait, I’m thinking of winter washout. I mean, they’re almost the same anyway. No offense to your Dance friends.”

Fabian laughed. “Yes offense to my Dance friends. They plan shit parties.” And then his laughter died a bit. “Remember… I mean, do you remember winter washout last year?”

Riz swallowed. The real question was whether Fabian remembered winter washout last year. Maybe he hadn’t been as drunk as Riz had believed he was. That was a… thought.

“Do you? I seem to recall you were pretty sloshed,” Riz said, trying for a joking tone.

“I wasn’t that sloshed.”

Riz could hear his own heartbeat. “Guess I remembered that part wrong, then.”

“Do you remember the… rain check?”

Riz glanced up at Fabian. His expression was unreadable – eyes fixed on the street ahead.

But Riz was still holding his arm, and he could feel the tension in his muscles.

“I remember,” Riz said quietly. He felt like he was doing something extremely dangerous, but he wasn’t sure what the danger was. Maybe it was just thrilling.

Riz wasn’t sure how or exactly when this occurred, but at some point they’d both stopped walking and rotated until they were facing each other, Riz’s arm still linked with Fabian’s – as if their bodies had moved without direction from their minds. It didn’t feel like a dream – Riz felt disorientingly present. Breathtakingly present. Like the ground had disappeared from under him, but it was okay somehow because there was a possibility he could fly. They were close enough that he could hear Fabian breathing, feel the warmth of his body, smell his designer aftershave.

“You finally gonna cash that in?” Fabian murmured, but he was already leaning in.

Fabian had been right: it really was much better than any kiss he’d ever had, Riz thought. But he couldn’t decide if it was because Fabian was actually a stunningly good kisser, or if it was because he was kissing Fabian. (Probably both.)

Riz couldn’t believe this was really happening, in the real, physical world. But Fabian kept kissing him, and Riz kept kissing him back, and Fabian kept kissing him harder, and then Riz was wrapping his arms all the way around his neck and Fabian was holding onto his waist with both hands and pretty soon they were fully making out on a rain-washed sidewalk in the middle of the night underneath the almost-full moon. Fabian tangled his fingers in Riz’s curls and Riz, bizarrely, thought about how it was a pity that his hair was getting all messed up after Fig styled it. And then he realized that he didn’t give a fuck about that because he was Kissing Fabian, and for all he cared Fabian could absolutely do whatever he wanted with his hair or any other part of him, for that matter.

“What are we doing –” he murmured, breaking away for breath as Fabian began kissing down his cheek and jaw.

Instead of answering, Fabian just cradled the back of his head with one hand and kissed him on the mouth again, which Riz certainly wasn’t going to complain about.

They very slowly made their way back to their neighborhood – extra slowly because they stopped every minute or so to kiss, and Fabian even kept trying to kiss his hair or his cheek or his wrist while they were walking which only made Riz laugh and almost trip over himself. They didn’t talk because any time Riz felt like saying something it occurred to him that he could just kiss Fabian instead, and then he immediately went with that option. And it didn’t help that whenever Riz opened his mouth Fabian seemed to see it as an opportunity to stick his tongue down Riz’s throat, and then Riz was always of course on board with that chain of events.

They didn’t actually speak any words out loud until they reached the door to Riz’s apartment.

“Can we – go inside?” Fabian murmured, pausing mid-sentence to plant one on the corner of Riz’s temple.

“Probably shouldn’t,” Riz murmured back, leaning in to mouth at Fabian’s neck. He could feel Fabian’s pulse – wildly fast. “Adaine is trancing, and I think Fig might actually be home too.”

“Mm. Bummer.”

Riz hummed in affirmation. “But…” he said to Fabian’s neck. “We should, like… talk? About what’s… happening right now? I think, maybe…”

Fabian picked him up in his arms and he sort of lost his train of thought.

“We could talk,” Fabian muttered, roughly pressing Riz’s back up against the door. “Or we could not talk, and we could just make out instead.” He let his body weight pin Riz and used one hand to fumble at Riz’s top button, clearly having already made his choice.

There was no hope for Riz, really. He wrapped his legs snugly around Fabian’s waist and reached up to cup Fabian’s face with both hands and pull their mouths back together.

They kept making out for a seemingly endless amount of time, but eventually, eons later, Riz’s back started to ache from being pinned against the door and he patted Fabian’s shoulder, which Fabian somehow correctly interpreted as a directive to carefully lower him back to the ground.

“I really wish we could go inside,” Fabian murmured, sliding his hands up under Riz’s shirt, which had unsurprisingly become completely untucked from his jeans. Riz arched into his touch, thrilling at Fabian’s sharp inhale.

“We can just go to my place instead… You can sleep over.”

“Like, sleep over, or… Sleep Over?”

“Both. Either. Whatever you want.” Fabian bent to nuzzle at his neck, two fingers hooked through one of his belt loops.

Riz contemplated letting Fabian take him to a second location. And then letting Fabian… take him. It was definitely a very. Appealing prospect.

But the possibility of moving another step in this wild new direction made him remember, again, that he still didn’t fully understand which direction they were heading in.

“I want to… but we ought to take it, like two and a half degrees slower, maybe… And we have to… we should…” It was really difficult to coherently finish full sentences when Fabian was running his hands over his hips and staring at him like he wanted to eat him alive.

“We should what? Do more of this later? I’m in favor,” Fabian breathed, and then began kissing him like he really was trying to eat him alive.

Riz let himself dive into it for… another seemingly endless amount of time. And then he scraped together the presence of mind to gently push Fabian’s chest until they broke apart. Fabian chased his lips but Riz cupped his cheek with one hand to hold him back, running a thumb over the corner of his mouth. “Okay, I’m serious, though, we should, like… what is this? What are we doing right now? What have we been doing for the past…” He glanced at his watch. “Oh god, hour, it’s been more than an hour since we left the party –”

Fabian grinned and covered Riz’s hand with his own. “Yeah, it has, huh?”

Riz’s body screamed at him to go in for another one but he held himself back. He needed to figure this out. “Okay, but like, what does this… mean? I just need to know.”

Fabian’s smile faltered for just a split-second. “Well… what do you, uh… think it means?”

Riz pouted; he didn’t want to make any potentially vulnerable statements until he had better knowledge of the situation. “C’mon, Fabes, I asked you.”

“It… I mean… it doesn’t have to ‘mean’ anything, right? The Ball, you’re overthinking, you always overthink.”

Fabian was starting to bluster, which meant he was avoiding something, which meant something was off. Riz furrowed his brow. “But…”

Fabian quickly kissed his mouth, expression now vaguely panicked. “It’s not a big deal! Don’t worry about it! What’s a little physical intimacy between friends?”

Now Riz was just confused. “I would say that was more than a little –”

Fabian gripped his shoulders and planted another short kiss on his mouth. “Listen, it doesn’t have to mean anything if we don’t want it to. Okay?”

“I…”

But Fabian was already sliding his hands away from Riz’s arms and making his way down the apartment steps. “Don’t overthink it, The Ball!”

“I... will try not to…” he said to Fabian’s retreating back.

It wasn’t until he was back in his apartment, brushing his teeth in front of the bathroom mirror and surveying the three or four maroon-purple hickeys now blooming on his jawline and collarbone that the reality of the situation fully sank in.

He’d just kissed Fabian. Like, kissed him a LOT. Fabian, who was his best friend, with whom he was secretly probably (definitely) in love. Fabian, who’d initiated the kissing but then seemed suspiciously cagey when it came to actually talking about it, which – Riz’s heart sank – likely meant that he’d just been doing a friends-with-benefits sort of thing and he didn’t want Riz to get all feelings-y on him.

Riz was still feeling a complicated mixture of emotions – happiness, arousal, confusion, hope – but worry was now growing increasingly prominent.

He sank to the floor, sitting with his back against the side of the bathtub – his back, which was sore from being pushed against the door to his apartment. His lips pursed loosely around his toothbrush – his lips, which were sore from being kissed.

Apropos of nothing, it occurred to him that they’d completely forgotten about their rice-krispy treats and tv-watching plan. Oh, well. Riz had the Solstice Special downloaded on his computer and he didn’t have marshmallows and rice cereal but he was pretty sure Fig had one-third of a container of chocolate ice cream in the freezer that she wouldn’t mind him stealing.

He thought about texting Fabian to ask if he still wanted to watch it together tonight, late as it was. He thought about asking him if he wanted to do it at a later date – shit. Should he avoid using the word ‘date’, just in general? Was that a line Fabian didn’t want to cross?

He thought about texting Fabian to ask how he’d feel about using the word ‘date’ to describe their hangouts, now that they’d… he touched the tender spots on his neck, lightly ran his fingers over his chapped lips.

But he was afraid the answer would be something he wouldn’t want to hear and, stupid as it was, he wanted to… put off hearing it. Until at least tomorrow. Maybe the day after. Maybe in a week. He’d just kissed the guy he loved for the first time ever, and he wanted to enjoy the memory and pretend everything was okay for as long as possible – as long as the delusion would hold.

He dug Fig’s ice cream out of the freezer, gathered up his laptop and headphones, and curled up in his bed for some soapy Solstice-themed elven drama.

Not lonely. A little lonesome.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> How/why do I update this fic so frequently?? you ask. Well, I'll tell you my secret: my hair is too short for me to impulsively chop it off and I have to expend my gay feral energy somehow
> 
> See you in ch. 5!


	5. Small Things

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> :')

(Summer) (Post Junior Year)

Adaine’s glasses glinted in the candlelight as she shook with laughter, cracking up so hard she almost slid off the sofa.

“Oh my god, don’t fall off!” Riz laughed, collapsing onto the makeshift pillow fort he’d constructed on the living room rug.

“I’m not – oh my god, I am,” Adaine said breathlessly, clambering back into a more secure position and wrapping her plush blanket around herself.

Fig was away spending the night at Ayda’s, and so her two roommates had organized a ‘sleepover night’ – they already slept in the same home every night, of course, but sometimes it was fun to lay out blankets and pillows in the living room and light candles and create the vibe of a slumber party just for fun. It was now well past midnight, and they’d made themselves tired and silly watching trivia game shows and playing ‘Would You Rather’ and drinking Mike’s Hard.

As their laughter died down and a comfortable silence settled over the room, Riz felt something waiting on his tongue. Something he’d been yearning to say it out loud – he needed to give it form, to share it with someone else. He just hadn’t found the right moment or the right person. But now felt like the right moment, and Adaine felt like the right person.

“Hey – um, Adaine? Can I tell you something?”

She smoothed her hair behind her ears, sitting criss-cross above him on the sofa. “Yeah, always, Riz. What is it?”

He closed his eyes, gulping. “I’ve been feeling – weird, about Fabian, lately.”

She frowned. “Like… weird in what way?”

“Like. Um. Maybe a… Okay, so, to back up, you know I don’t really feel romantic and sexual attraction that much, right?”

She nodded patiently.

“But. Um. I think I might be – feeling it right now. Like, it’s hard to tell for sure, you know, because it’s not like I feel it that often, but I also just, like… I think I just know. Like, deep down. This is…” He took a deep breath. “This is it.”

Adaine was silent for a moment, processing that. “Wow, Riz. That’s a big deal. Thanks for telling me.”

He nodded, laughing nervously. “It’s good to finally tell someone, I guess.”

“Have you been, like, keeping it a secret for a while?”

“I… guess? I only really came to this conclusion somewhat recently, but it’s been… brewing for a while. Like, there have been signs for a long time. And now I’m putting it together.”

She tilted her head thoughtfully. “How do you… I mean, how do you feel about it?”

That was a good question. He considered it. “…Scared, I think.”

“Scared? Of what?”

“It feels like I’m entering a new… phase, maybe. Like things are gonna be different now between me and him – I’m gonna have to hide how I feel, and that’s new. And scary. And it’s probably gonna hurt, a bit.”

“But… what if he feels the same?”

He shook his head. “Seems unlikely.”

“How do you know?”

“I just… well, I guess I don’t, like, for-sure know. But… it’s hard to envision that.”

Her mouth quirked into a half-smile. “Maybe you should try envisioning it. Might feel more possible if you do.”

“I don’t wanna… Like, I don’t wanna let myself believe that it might happen.”

“Why?”

“Because then I’ll want it even more. And it’ll hurt even more if I don’t get it.”

They both didn’t speak for a moment, soaking that in.

“That does sound scary,” Adaine said softly.

“Yeah,” Riz breathed.

Slowly, she climbed down from the sofa and sat next to him on the floor. He leaned into her, sighing. She reached up and stroked his hair. “Fabian’s your friend.”

He nodded into her shoulder.

“You two are really close.”

He nodded again.

“And I – well, it’s hard for me to believe anything would ever change that. After all we’ve been through together. I think things are gonna be okay no matter what, Riz. I promise that, in fact. Do you believe me?”

“I want to,” he said.

She chuckled softly. “Wanting is enough. It’s a start.”

He squeezed her knee. “Thanks, Adaine.”

“Don’t thank me. Watch ‘Pirates of the Celestine’ with me. Do you wanna?”

“Fuck yeah. Let’s get more blankets and pillows first, though.”

“From where?”

He looked up at her, smirking. “…Fig’s bedroom?”

Adaine smirked back. “I mean… she wouldn’t really care, right?”

“She’s not even here…”

“It’s her own fault, really…”

They grinned at each other. And then they scrambled to their feet and raced to Fig’s door to steal her bedding, laughing hysterically as their socks slid on the carpet.

(Present Day)

Riz sat at the bus stop outside the biology building, paging through the chapter he was supposed to read for his wizardry class tonight. Maybe he could get some of it done on the bus. The dappled sunlight painted shifting patterns on the pages as it filtered through the sheltering maple trees overhead, and a gentle breeze lifted his hair. He really didn’t want to stay inside studying all afternoon – it was a brilliantly sunny day, perfect for the beginning of a new month. Which reminded him of the rapidly dwindling number of weeks remaining until summer and the imminent finale of his college experience. So much was changing right now.

Including things he hadn’t imagined ever changing.

As if on cue, he spotted a tall, muscular figure approaching him on the sidewalk, platinum hair flashing in the sun. “The Ball!”

Riz wondered if he could feasibly get away with pretending to be a different person that Fabian had mistaken for Riz. And then he realized that that was crazy and he was twenty-two years old and he could damn well act like a normal adult goblin during this interaction, goddammit.

“Hey,” Fabian said, a bit out of breath after jogging the last few yards to the bus stop. “Nice day out, isn’t it?” He sat down heavily on the bench. Riz stiffened slightly.

It had been about two days since – the thing happened, and they hadn’t actually seen each other in person since then. Riz’s crystal had lit up with a couple of texts indicating that Fabian wanted to ‘hang out ;)’ but he’d responded to both with a short, vague, minimally apologetic note about how busy he was. Judging by Fabian’s current general air of excitement, he probably hadn’t read into that very deeply.

The problem was that eventually Riz knew they were going to have to have an Uncomfortable Conversation where Fabian proposed that they casually hook up on the reg and Riz politely turned him down because, you know… that kind of scenario would make it exponentially more challenging for him to make-believe that he wasn’t fervidly in love with Fabian. Alternatively, they would have to have an Even More Uncomfortable Conversation where Fabian explained that he did not also feel butterflies in his chest when he saw Riz and it was super weird and creepy that Riz felt butterflies in his chest when he saw Fabian and maybe they just shouldn’t see each other at all anymore because Fabian needed a different best friend.

Riz’s primary goal at the moment was to avoid the second case. And so far the only strategy he’d been able to come up with was ‘Avoid Talking to Fabian in General As Much As Possible (Better Strategy Pending)’.

It was hard to think strategically when Fabian looked, just, so… absolutely criminally hot. The spring sunshine burnished his complexion to glimmering copper, but even beyond that, his hair was untidy in that sexy way that Fabian always tried to ‘fix’ but Riz privately adored, his t-shirt clung to his muscles, his joggers clung to his hips, his eyes sparkled, he’d inexpertly dabbed concealer on various patches of his neck – oh.

Riz cleared his throat and shyly fixed his gaze on the textbook on his lap. “Um. Yeah. It is a nice day.”

“You look really good in this light.”

Riz glanced back up, a bit surprised. He nervously ran his fingers through his hair, pushing it away from his face. “Um, thanks.”

Fabian smiled – that goddamn million-watt smile of his. “So, are we hanging out later, or…?”

Riz swallowed. “…Are we?”

He did want to hang out with Fabian. Of course he did. He always wanted to hang out with Fabian. But he also wanted to delay the inevitable. Very urgently, with the impotent desperation of a man trying to, you know… delay the inevitable.

Fabian smiled again, biting his lip. “Well… I was thinking, if you want… we could maybe… go to the lake? And because it’s so sunny out… maybe we could have a picnic? Does that sound… okay?” He trailed off, waiting for Riz’s approval.

‘Oh, like a date?’ Riz didn’t say. He actually didn’t even say anything at all because he was focusing so much of his energy on not letting himself say That.

At Riz’s silence, Fabian continued. “And then maybe afterwards we can… watch the Solstice Special? You know, since we didn’t, ah, get around to watching it… the other night. And then, you know, we can just keep hanging out and maybe… see where the night takes us?”

Riz could tell he was attempting to end on a sexy suggestive note, but his vibe overwhelmingly came across as hopeful and earnest and sweet in a way that was so very Fabian and so very endearing to Riz and so very ruinous when it came to his self-control.

“Oh, like a date?” Riz blurted out involuntarily, because evidently he loved nothing more than to sabotage himself.

Fabian’s eyes widened almost comically. “Oh! Is that – I mean – do you – would that be, ah – are you – like, if it – if we –”

“I was joking!” Riz said quickly, cutting him off. “I was just joking. I was goofing around! Oh my god, your face.” He laughed in a way that totally sounded relaxed, authentic, and not even a little bit hysterical.

“Oh – okay!” Fabian looked vaguely shell-shocked.

Neither of them said anything for an uncomfortably long moment. And then Fabian cleared his throat. “Well, so, anyway… do you wanna? Hang out?”

“I actually, um…” Riz chewed his lip. “I already watched the Solstice Special. By myself.”

Fabian face was momentarily stricken and then he seemed to recover. “Oh, um… that’s fine. We can… do something else?”

“Well… I actually have a lot of reading to do today,” Riz said, half-heartedly gesturing at the textbook in his lap. “So maybe… another time.” Dimly, he was aware that he couldn’t just keep putting off hanging out with Fabian for the rest of eternity. It was only a temporary solution. A temporary solution that made him feel… sad. Although not as sad he would be when Fabian formally rejected him, he reminded himself.

Fabian nodded. “I get it,” he said, sounding a bit sad himself. “Well… you’ll text me when you’re free, then? I guess?”

Riz nodded, avoiding eye contact.

“And hey – I know you’re, like, busy right now, and shit, but just – don’t work too hard, okay?”

Riz peered through his eyelashes at Fabian, who was watching him with such genuine, melancholy concern that Riz couldn’t help but… let himself be real. Just a little. Just for a moment. “I’ll try,” he said softly. “Thanks for looking out for me.”

“You don’t have to thank me. It’s just what I do. Because I’m so caring and perfect and such a good. Uh. Friend,” Fabian said, expression tender.

And they must have been sitting closer than Riz realized, or maybe they’d shifted without him noticing, because Fabian didn’t even have to lean in very far before their lips were touching. It was just a short, gentle, chaste, very tongue-free kiss – Riz barely even felt it before Fabian was pulling away again. But it brought every single one of his anxieties hurtling back to the surface.

“Hold on,” he said, leaning away from Fabian. “Hold on. So, kissing – is that just, like, a thing we do now?”

Fabian’s eyes shifted nervously. “I, ah…”

Riz balled his fists over his eyes and groaned. He’d been trying so hard, dammit. But Fabian was making it impossible for him to keep ignoring what scared him.

“The Ball? Did I do something wrong?”

Riz lowered his hands to see Fabian’s pained expression – an expression which would normally melt his heart and lower his defenses and drive him to drop everything and envelop his best friend in a hug and promise him everything would be okay, but not right now. Right now he was frustrated.

“Why do you keep kissing me?”

Fabian hung his head, fingers twisting one of his pants drawstrings. “…I’ll stop, I’m sorry.”

Riz shook his head, running his hands through his hair. “No, just – that’s not what I meant! Why are you – how do you feel about the – about the kissing? About – me?”

“You keep asking me that,” Fabian said, lifting his head to squint at Riz. “But you’re also not saying how you… feel.” He gulped, visibly anxious.

Riz hated that he had a point. He huffed angrily. “I’m just – fuck. I think I just. Need space right now.” He didn’t look at Fabian, instead staring intently at the trees in front of the paladin studies building across the street. Because he knew if he saw Fabian’s hurt expression, he’d lose his nerve and wrap him in his arms.

“Is that why you watched the special by yourself? Because you ‘need space’?”

Riz folded his arms. “What do you care? You don’t even like that show.”

“Maybe I do like it. And I just never said it out loud.”

“Maybe you should’ve said it out loud, then.”

They sat in tense silence. Riz could hear blood pounding in his ears.

There was a rumble as a bus approached the curb. Riz briefly caught sight of his reflection in one of the windows, and there was a strange, surreal moment where he thought he saw his teenage self in the glass – young, naïve, lonely, brave as hell but just as terrified. Then the bus moved and the moment was over.

“This is my bus,” Riz said, getting up, still not looking at Fabian. He adjusted his messenger bag and hurried to the door as it swung open with a hiss.

He didn’t say goodbye as he boarded the bus – it was the first time he could recall ever walking away from Fabian without even calling out a farewell. And he didn’t look at Fabian through the window as the bus pulled away – he waited until it was almost around the corner to allow himself a peek at the lone figure still sitting at the bus stop, platinum head lowered in his hands.

Riz leaned back in his seat. “Fuck,” he exhaled heavily.

And then he pulled out his crystal to open Fantasy Maps and figure out when he could get off this bus and catch the one he was actually supposed to be on.

(Autumn) (Senior Year)

“Hey. You need any help?”

Fig glanced up at Riz. He leaned against the doorframe of her bedroom, hands in his pockets. Well, technically it was Adaine’s bedroom now – she and Fig were swapping because Adaine wanted a window with a tree next to it and Fig wanted a window that wasn’t blocked by foliage. Adaine had already neatly packed her belongings in boxes for ease of movement, and Fig was in the process of haphazardly gathering everything she owned in armfuls and carrying it over to deposit it on the floor in the room next door.

She narrowed her eyes at him as she kicked storage bins out from under her bed. “I sense an ulterior motive. Is there an ulterior motive?”

“Can I not do something nice for my roommate?” He walked into the room and began organizing papers on her desk into a tidy stack.

They worked in silence for a moment. He watched her as she bent to reach for something that had ended up shuffled deep under the bed against the wall. The slanted sunset light through the blinds etched lines of red-gold and shadow across the room, igniting Fig’s dark hair in stripes. “I actually… do have an ulterior motive.”

She whipped around, grinning. “I fucking knew it! What do you want from me? Do you want me to vacuum next week so you won’t have to? Because the answer to that is never!”

He tossed a rolled-up pair of socks at her. “C’mon, Fig! I wanted to talk to you about something. Like, a serious thing.”

She flopped onto her bed and rested on her elbows to regard him. “Have you come to me for my sage advice? Lay it on me, Riz. Give me the deets, and I’ll bless you with my priceless wisdom.”

He rolled his eyes. And then sighed. And then hopped up on the desk and leaned his back against the wall – he needed to not be standing on his feet for this conversation. “I think I…” He swallowed. “I think I might have, like… romantic feelings. For Fabian.”

Fig’s eyes widened and she hunched forward, chin in hands. “Oh my god, what?” she hissed. “Really?”

He nodded, chewing his lip. “Yeah.”

“I thought you weren’t really, like… big on romance?”

“I mean, I wasn’t. I’m – well, maybe I am now. But just – only for him.” He gazed shyly down at his lap, hands toying with the fabric of his pants.

“Oh my god, that’s actually so, like, sweet and romantic, like I think I might cry. Like, he’s your soulmate or some shit.”

“I wouldn’t necessarily say… that.” But he would think it. He had thought it. A few times.

When she didn’t say anything in response, he glanced up through his eyelashes to see her smiling fondly. “Aww, Riz. This is some fucking cute-ass shit.”

He huffed a laugh, rolling his eyes. “Okay but… do you think there’s any chance that he… that he might…”

Fig pursed her lips thoughtfully. “I mean… it’s hard to say.”

He nodded mutely, insides suddenly feeling hollow.

“But I will say this,” she continued. “Romantically or not, he loves you. He loves you so much. I’m sure of that.”

“You – you think so?”

“I know so. I’m surprised you don’t know so.”

Riz was silent. On some level, he sort of did know, but he wasn’t always brave enough to let himself believe it.

The light faded in the room as the sun sank below the horizon. “I don’t know what to do, Fig,” he said quietly.

“About – about your feelings for him?”

Riz nodded again. She half-smiled, tucking a flyaway behind her ear.

“My advice is to be brave. And trust.”

He snorted. “That’s so vague, like, what does mean?”

She threw the rolled-up socks back at him. “You’re so ungrateful for my advice! Okay, this is what I’m saying: there’s gonna come a moment, someday, like, in your relationship with him, when you’re gonna have to be brave, and trust. And when that moment comes – you just gotta do it. You just gotta open your heart and do something terrifying and crazy, Riz.”

“Is this a prophecy?” he asked, arching an eyebrow.

“I’m speaking it into existence. Follow my advice, Riz. This is how you’re gonna get the dicking-down you deserve.”

“Oh my god!” He tossed the socks at her again, laughing.

She dodged, starting to laugh herself. “You deserve it, Riz! You deserve good dick from someone who loves you! I speak it into existence, I speak that into existence!”

“Oh my god, okay, Fig.” He doubled over, cracking up.

“Hey! Are you grateful for my advice?”

“Yeah, I actually really am. Thank you.”

“Love you, Riz.”

“Love you too.”

(Present Day)

‘hey riz if ur just lying around being Depressed can u help box up the shit in my room so i dont have 2 do as much work when I get back k love u xx’

Riz heaved a sigh, dropping his crystal on the mattress with a soft thud. He rolled over, twisting himself in his blankets, yanking a pillow over his head to block out the afternoon sunlight filtering between the blinds.

Fig and Ayda were – finally – officially moving in together over the summer, and so Fig had begun the process of gradually transferring her worldly possessions over from one apartment to the other. Which actually meant that she was around the apartment about as often as she had been before, but now there were cardboard boxes haphazardly lying around the hallway half-filled with apparently randomized collections of objects, and the floor of her room was even more buried under a detritus of three-week-old laundry, forgotten books, and tangled electronic cables than before. The only evidence he’d seen of any packing progress was the cardboard boxes occasionally shifting position, although never appearing any more full.

He'd had the opportunity to closely observe this ‘progress’ because over the past week he’d been home pretty much whenever he wasn’t in class. ‘Lying around being Depressed,’ as Fig had said.

Each day he still managed to bully himself into getting dressed in a snappy outfit, shaving, fixing his hair, and washing his face before class, which helped him feel like less of a hermit. But then as soon as he came home from class he just… lay on the sofa or his bed in said snappy outfit, messing up his hair again by flattening it against the pillows. Which was how he’d spent most of the day since coming home from his journalism seminar around noon.

There was a light knock on his door. He grunted.

A click. “Hey, Riz. You awake?” Adaine whispered.

He hummed affirmatively, face still buried in his pillow.

“Okay, cool,” she said, raising her voice to a normal volume. “Did Fig also text you about helping her pack her room?”

“Mm-hmm.”

“Do you wanna, like… do that with me right now?”

“Maybe later,” he mumbled.

He heard her sigh. “I really think you should get up and do something, you know. I’m not sure what you’re moping about but it’s been going on a bit long, don’t you think?”

He didn’t answer, because he knew she was right.

“At the very least, you should come help so we can hang out while we’re doing it, because I’m sleeping over at Kristen and Tracker’s tonight so I probably won’t see you until tomorrow afternoon at the earliest. And I feel like we haven’t really hung out that much this week because of aforementioned moping. Won’t you indulge your dear roomie?”

Riz could never decline to indulge his dear roomie. He sat up and clambered out of bed, re-tucking his shirt and running a hand through his hair so it was parted on the proper side again.

Adaine smiled fondly. “Welcome back to the waking world.”

“All right, all right,” Riz grumbled, following her out the door to Fig’s bedroom.

Back in ye olden days of sophomore year this had been his room, before he and Adaine swapped because she needed the larger closet space to store her extra bookshelf. And in fall of senior year she and Fig had swapped rooms again for a reason Riz could never remember, but she’d continued keeping the bookshelf in the closet because it was too much work to move it and she could generally walk in and out whenever she wanted anyway because Fig had no concept of personal space.

Fig had only technically been living in this room for less than a year – much, much less than a year if you only counted the nights she’d actually slept in it – but it was still unmistakably hers. The original paint color was mostly invisible below a layer of peeling tour posters and promotional art for various punk bands. Her desk chair had been shoved into the closet to make room for her amp, and her desk itself solely functioned as a stand for her electronic keyboard. Fig had removed the blinds and replaced them with makeshift curtains she’d fashioned out of a bi pride flag and an anarchist flag, which was certainly… a color combination.

“We probably have to put the blinds back up eventually, right? Like, if we ever move out of this place? So the landlord doesn’t freak out?” Riz commented, wobbling carefully across the room. It was impossible to avoid stepping on Fig’s stuff, but his main objective was to simply avoid landing on things that would hurt his feet, like electric plugs and plastic containers and breakable ceramic mugs.

“I guess so… but the problem is that I don’t know where she put them, and I doubt she does either.”

“Fair point,” Riz said. He set his hands on his hips. “Okay, where do we start?”

They spent the next hour or so attempting to organize the items scattered on the floor, which meant putting the things that seemed important in the boxes in the hallway, piling the laundry on Fig’s bed, and corralling the things that seemed like they were maybe garbage into the corners of the room because it felt disingenuous to throw them away when Fig herself wasn’t around but it also felt like a waste of time to pack them. As they worked, they chatted off-handedly about school, graduation, what they wanted to do this summer.

He’d missed Adaine, Riz realized. It felt silly to miss someone that he lived with, but there it was. He needed to be more intentional about spending time with her, especially to make up for the past week.

“I guess we ought to work on the closet now…?” Adaine began, shooting a trepidatious glance at the vented wooden saloon doors. Fig had found a rainbow bead curtain at a thrift store and hung it over the closet entrance, and the door/curtain combo was… a design choice.

“I guess so.” Riz walked over to it. (It was so freeing to be able to just walk across the floor without any obstacles.)

“Just warning you, it’s pretty gnarly in there…”

Riz pushed the doors apart and almost immediately tripped over a tupperware container that appeared to be full of… cheap sunglasses? He braced his arm on the doorframe to keep himself upright, accidentally stepping on a stack of extremely old-looking board games. “I think Fig might be a hoarder,” he said irritably, groping for the light switch.

This was the only bedroom in the apartment with a walk-in closet, but the ‘walk-in’ part was somewhat defeated by its apparent transformation into an in-home storage unit. “Oh dear,” Adaine muttered, peering in from behind him. “It looks like some of this stuff has been here since before she moved in. Aside from the bookshelf, I mean.”

He side-eyed her. “Isn’t that your partially your fault?”

“Hey!” She gently punched him in the arm. “And, okay, you’re right. But I think some of these boxes might even be yours. Like, I definitely don’t recognize this. I don’t wear this type of shoe, and Fig doesn’t either.” She bent to pick up a small cardboard shoebox from where it had been clumsily dropped into a larger plastic storage bin, half-buried in what looked like multicolored fabric scraps. She lifted it to investigate more closely, blowing dust off the lid.

Riz narrowed his eyes. It did look vaguely familiar, and there was a little thumbnail image on one side showing a pair of shoes he’d worn for about a year before the soles finally came unglued from overuse. Those shoes had been gone since at least last summer, though, if not before. He must’ve left this box in the closet when he changed rooms at the beginning of junior year and then forgotten all about it. “I think that is mine… Whoops.”

“Do you remember what’s in it?” Adaine asked curiously.

He shook his head. “Let’s take a look.”

“Ooh, I hope it’s secret treasure.” She removed the lid and frowned thoughtfully. “It’s… mail? Hopefully not important mail, if it’s been in this box for two years.”

Riz frowned, confused. “Mail? What do you mean?”

She set the box down on top of a steamer trunk decorated with car bumper stickers (clearly Fig’s work) and removed a stack of letters – some in envelopes, some folded and tied with twine – all bound together with a fraying peach-colored satin ribbon. She blew the dust away. The bundle was thick enough that she could hold it in both hands, the yellowing paper rustling and shifting as she moved it. “Are these love letters? Did you have a secret admirer you never told us about, Riz? Who knew exploring Fig’s closet would uncover so many secrets!”

Riz took the bundle from her hands, being careful not to let any loose letters fall onto the floor – well, not the floor, but onto some other object covering the floor. “Ohhh, I think I remember what these are. They must be from the summer before junior year. They’re all from, uh… Fabian.”

Adaine raised her eyebrows, uncannily resembling the Eyes emoji. “Oh.”

Riz bit his lip, gingerly thumbing through the stack. The stamps from port cities all over Spyre. The differently colored and sized envelopes, all now faded and worn from their journey and then from age. Riz’s address, elegantly calligraphed with Fabian’s fountain pen: ‘To: Riz “The Ball” Gukgak’.

“I forgot all about these,” he said softly. Heart aching.

The corner of Adaine’s mouth stretched in a fond smile. “Wanna do some reading?”

As the sun sank lower in the sky, painting panes of golden light on the apartment walls, Adaine and Riz curled up on opposite ends of the living room sofa, stack of letters split evenly between them. Adaine read out loud and Riz read to himself.

There were some things that were kind of funny and embarrassing, like Fabian’s stories about the people who flirted with him in taverns, or his anecdotes about personal hygiene in a pirate ship crew, or his attempts to make jokes that didn’t quite translate over paper – or maybe they just didn’t quite translate over the span of two years. There were some things that were just a little bittersweet – for example, the memory of how excited twenty-year-old Riz had been to find these in his mailbox every couple of weeks, and the knowledge that that moment in his life lay in the past. Fabian’s penmanship was still just as beautiful – his reaction to that would never change. And there were some reactions that were new – there were a few lines here and there that made his heart forget a beat or two, now that he had a new sort of… context, for how he felt about Fabian.

“‘Dear The Ball, I miss you dearly, as I do every day,’” Adaine read, imitating Fabian’s lofty intonation. “‘I find myself wondering and imagining where you are as you read this, what you’re doing, what time of day it is, what you’re wearing –’ oh my, should I even be reading this? This seems a bit private,” she snickered.

“Oh, hush, it wasn’t like that,” Riz groused, kicking her ankle.

She smirked. “Well, he goes on to describe what he’s picturing you wearing – are you absolutely sure it wasn’t ‘like that’?”

“Oh, c’mon, Adaine!” He kicked her again. And then paused. “Wait, what was he picturing?”

She began imitating Fabian’s voice again. “‘You always dress so nice when you’re going to work, don’t you? Your smart button-downs and pressed slacks and silken ties. It must be hot there at this time of the summer – I’m picturing you sitting at your desk, tie loosened, sleeves rolled up. Maybe you’ve unbuttoned your shirt and removed it completely –’”

“Adaine!” he interrupted, laughing. “He didn’t write that!”

“Okay, fine, I made up the last sentence,” she admitted, setting the letter on her lap. “But you have to agree it flows naturally in context! And that’s exactly my point! Some of these letters are a bit steamy, don’t you think?”

“They’re definitely not.”

“Well, I raise you this: ‘I think about you a lot, The Ball. I keep seeing people out of the corner of my eye in alleyways and mistaking them for you. I swear I’m going crazy. Maybe you’re the one who’s been keeping me sane all along.’”

Riz took a moment to get his breathing under control. “That’s just – friends say that –”

“Okay, well, what about: ‘Last night there was a full moon. I wish you could’ve been here to look at it with me. There’s nothing quite like watching a summer moon rise over the open sea from the starboard of a pirate ship rocking in the waves. It’s just perfect. Well, it was almost perfect.’”

Riz opened his mouth but he couldn’t think of what to say. His face was on fire.

“And what about this one: ‘Telling jokes just isn’t the same when I know I won’t hear your laugh. I hope that as soon as I return I’ll be able to think of something clever to say so that I can hear you laughing again right away.’”

Riz covered his face with his hands, groaning. “Oh my god. Stop.”

Adaine just cackled and Riz stared at her witheringly. “Okay, well, why was he talking so much about his romantic exploits, then? Like, listen to this.” He paused, preparing his own attempt at a Fabian impression. “‘Just got back from a pub crawl with the crew. I saw the most attractive man sitting at the bar and I swear he was making eyes at me. We got to talking and he wanted to take me home with him and oh how I yearned for it but sadly I told him I must away to my first mate duties.’”

Adaine’s lips twitched. “I mean, it sounds to me like he was trying to make you jealous.”

“I’m pretty sure he was just bragging.”

“Well, maybe, but I’d also say bragging is related to Fabian’s flirting style.”

Riz threw up his hands. “What do I have to say to convince you you’re wrong?”

“What do I have to say to convince you YOU’RE wrong? What if I said: ‘The Ball, do you think about me often? I like to imagine you do, even when you’re not reminded of me, but as you’re just going about your day: at work, during meals, in the shower –’”

“Stop, he did NOT say the shower part,” Riz scoffed.

“He did! Look for yourself!” Adaine triumphantly waved the letter in the air.

Riz snatched it out of her hand and looked closely. Sure enough, it was written there verbatim, in Fabian’s neat, looping hand. “Christ,” he muttered.

“Are you convinced yet?” Adaine snickered.

Riz didn’t say anything – he was busy scanning through the rest of the letter, wondering how and why his younger self hadn’t picked up on any of the subtext that Adaine kept noticing immediately.

“Well…” Adaine cleared her throat. “I have to leave for Kristen’s pretty soon – oh shit, I should’ve left, like, twenty minutes ago. You finish reading those, and – hey.”

He glanced up at her, a bit dazed.

She smiled at him and reached over to fondly squeeze his knee. “Maybe you should give Fabian a call. Can’t hurt.” Her tone was strangely knowing.

He just nodded. He still felt… disoriented.

After she left, he finished reading the rest of the letters. And then he bundled them back up neatly in as close to chronological order as he could figure out and then he laid them back in the box, in turn placing the box in its new home in his own closet. And then he made his bed, tidied the apartment a bit, freshened himself up, and padded to the kitchen to start making pasta for dinner.

And then he slid his crystal out of his pocket and dialed Fabian’s number.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Riz's letters: Work is good. Weather good.  
> Fabian's letters: Haha yea ;) but what would u be doing if i was there lol ;)
> 
> Thank you so much for reading! Sorry to end on a cliffhanger lol :') The angst is over now though I can promise ya that


	6. Forever & Ever

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oops! All Fluff

(Present Day)

Riz nervously chewed his lip as he listened to the sound of Fabian’s crystal ringing. God, please pick up, he mentally begged.

While he waited, he busied himself stirring the boiling pasta he was making himself for dinner. Maybe he should add some salt. People added salt to pasta water, right?

Finally, there was a click and then a noncommittal grunt through the crystal.

Riz sighed. “Fabian? That’s you, right?”

“…Yeah.”

He paused for a moment, stirring. “I hate not talking to you.”

Another pause. “I hate not talking to you, too.” His tone sounded a little softer than it had before.

Riz smiled to himself. His hearted pounded. “Well… good. So let’s talk, then.”

“…Okay. Come over?”

“How about you come over here? I’m making pasta.”

“Ooh, what kind?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t planned the sauce yet. I’m just boiling the noodles right now.”

“You haven’t picked a sauce yet? The Ball, you’re a ridiculous person. You have to organize your meals so that the flavors complement each other.”

In Riz’s opinion, Fabian was the more ridiculous one of the two of them, but he didn’t bother pointing that out. “Well, why don’t you just come over and help me then, if you’re such an expert?” he said, sighing exasperatedly. And fondly.

“I literally am. I’m putting my coat on right now.”

“Put your coat on faster. The noodles are almost done.”

“I’m hurrying!”

“Okay, I’ll see you in ten, then.”

Riz made to hang up, but then Fabian said, “Wait! Can we just… stay on the phone while I walk over?”

“Why? You’ll be here in ten minutes,” Riz laughed.

“I know, but I just, fucking… I just missed you, okay? I missed talking to you.”

Riz felt his stomach flip over. “I missed you too. I mean, I missed talking to you.”

“Wow, you missed me? You’re like, obsessed with me or something, The Ball.”

Riz sighed. Again. “You’re so fucking annoying. Walk faster, I wanna see you.”

“You really are enamored of me. I fucking knew it,” Fabian said, but he sounded a little breathless, like he was walking fast.

“Yeah, you got me, I’m ‘enamored of’ you.” He wondered if Fabian could hear how truthful it was.

They talked on the phone as Fabian made his way to the apartment – just about normal things. All the how-was-your-day conversations they’d missed out on over the past week, condensed into ten minutes. It was actually more like eight, because Fabian did walk fast like Riz had told him told him to, but it was still enough time for Riz to finish boiling the pasta and drain it in the sink. He had only just poured it from the colander back into the pot when he heard a knock at the door.

Riz hurried to the door so fast he almost tripped and fell on his face. He took a brief moment to collect himself, smooth his shirt, tousle his hair, inhale and exhale deeply. His heart still felt like it was going to beat right out of his throat, but there was nothing to be done about that.

“The Ball?” Fabian’s voice was muffled through the door. “I know you’re there. And I can hear you thinking from out here.”

Riz rolled his eyes. “Oh, yeah? And what am I thinking?”

“That you… can’t wait to see me.” Fabian sounded slightly hopeful. Riz grinned to himself, feeling butterflies taking flight in his ribcage.

He opened the door. “That’s exactly right,” he said, heart pounding as he smiled up at his best friend. His unbelievably handsome best friend, backlit by the hazy glow of a golden pre-sunset sky, who somehow looked more handsome than ever even though he was dressed like he’d clearly dropped everything in the middle of a workout to come here – neon running shorts and a muscle tank underneath a completely mismatched wool coat.

Fabian stared at him for a moment with an unreadable expression. And then he just leaned down, cupped the back of his head, and kissed him. Like it was nothing. Like it was the most natural thing in the world. And it felt that way, a bit, too – Riz was surprised by his own utter lack of surprise. Kissing him back was as right and reasonable as breathing out after breathing in. It was the pre-destined cosmic order of things; they were meant to be kissing right now. Nothing else would make any sense.

Riz would never be able to accurately recall how long that kiss was. It might have been two seconds long. It might have been two minutes. (Two hours? No, that seemed truly unrealistic.) He only knew that as Fabian pulled away, he began to come back to himself a little bit and remember that they were supposed to be talking tonight, not kissing, and he also had no idea why Fabian had kissed him at that particular moment, and there was also pasta in the kitchen that was probably starting to get cold.

“Wha – are you –” Riz stammered, struggling to organize all the questions in his mind into something resembling coherent speech.

Fabian’s face fell. “Oh, sorry, was that not what you wanted?”

Riz flapped his hand impatiently. “No, just –”

“Okay, good, because I thought it was excellent.”

“Fabian –”

“And you seemed to like it, too. Just saying,” Fabian grinned. Smug bastard. Riz couldn’t stand him. (That wasn’t true.) (He was enamored of him.)

He rested his hands on Fabian’s chest, laughing shakily. “For the love of god, can you stop interrupting for long enough to let me finish one goddamn sentence?”

Fabian smirked. “I just did. Happy?”

Riz really wanted to kiss him again but he imagined that would not be conducive to the two of them actually having a verbal conversation, so instead he sighed and pulled on the lapels of his wool coat and said, “Can you just come inside and help with dinner? I’m already tired of listening to your bullshit.”

“I know something we could do that would shut me up,” Fabian said hopefully as he followed Riz into the kitchen, depositing himself on a barstool.

Riz restrained himself from laughing because he knew that would only encourage him. “Okay, listen,” he said, opening the refrigerator door and glancing over the admittedly meager array of sauces. “We, like, actually have to have a serious talk.”

Fabian slumped over the kitchen counter. “But do we actually have to, though?” he whined.

Riz felt a bloom of fondness for him and then immediately tamped it down. He had to keep it serious. “We do,” he said. “Listen, we shouldn’t kiss again until we talk.”

Fabian appraised him, chin cupped in one hand. “So then… we can kiss after we talk.”

Riz ducked his head into the fridge and pretended to rummage around for something. He felt like if he maintained eye contact with Fabian he’d lose his cool and just start making out with him. “Well, it depends on how the talk goes.”

“I want the record to show that I’m in favor of kissing.”

Riz carefully closed the refrigerator door and then turned around slowly, leaning against it because his ability to stand felt pretty uncertain right now. “I… am, too,” he said quietly. And then immediately flicked his gaze down to the floor because his face was burning up.

“I knew you were crazy about me,” Fabian said. Riz still wasn’t looking at him, so it was hard to tell if he was joking.

“I am. Crazy about you, I mean.” Riz sighed. Might as well get that out in the open.

He finally glanced up at Fabian, who stared at him in silence, eyes like saucers. Riz’s heart sank. He pinched the bridge of his nose. “Look… I just figured I ought to tell the truth. I’m just… I’m really fucking in love with you, Fabian, goddammit. And I don’t think I can do the whole… friends-with-benefits thing. I’m just not wired for it.”

Fabian opened his mouth like he wanted to say something but Riz held up a hand. “Can you let me finish?”

Fabian nodded mutely, eyes still huge.

Riz took another deep breath and undid the top button of his short-sleeve button-down, because the emotional vulnerability was starting to make him sweaty. Fabian’s gaze immediately locked onto his exposed collarbone and Riz snapped his fingers. “Hey, focus, I’m still talking, you goof.”

When he was sure he had Fabian’s attention again, he continued. “Okay, so… I still don’t really know why you kissed me. The time just now, or the other times. And I guess the reason I was kind of, like, avoiding you is because… it seemed like you just wanted to kiss or have sex for, like, fun or whatever. I mean, maybe that’s not what you want – I guess I shouldn’t have assumed. But it felt like that at the time. And the thing is, Fabian…” He sighed. “I do wanna kiss you. Really badly. And I do wanna have sex with you – hey, focus. But I would only wanna do it as – as boyfriends. Because that’s just the kind of guy I am.”

He shakily ran a hand through his hair. “Is it – is it hot in here? It feels hot in here, I swear to god.”

Fabian opened his mouth to respond but Riz flapped his hand. “Nope, still not done. That was a rhetorical question. Anyway, so… I love you. In a romantic way. I did say that before, but I just need you to really understand.” He stared down at his socks, because eye contact felt just about impossible to handle. The socks had little carrots on them. He’d gotten them in a birthday gift from Adaine last year.

“And so… if you don’t feel that… same way, about me, then I don’t wanna kiss anymore,” he said to his socks. “And I’m sorry if… knowing how I feel makes you uncomfortable. But I just had to tell the truth. And if you need some space from me, or you’d rather not be friends at all because it’s too weird being friends with someone who’s in love with you, then I’ll… well, I’ll be really fucking sad, first of all, but I’ll understand. And I’ll get over the sadness, too – I don’t want you to feel like I’m guilting you into being my friend.”

Finally, he looked up at Fabian, whose expression was unreadable. His posture was taut, as though he was poised to move but waiting for the go-ahead. After a pause, he asked, “…Can I talk now?”

Riz nodded. He felt very drained, like he might collapse if he stopped leaning on the refrigerator. He shoved his hands in his pants pockets to hide how much they were shaking.

Fabian exhaled. “I don’t actually care about homemade face masks.”

Riz was so confused he momentarily forgot to be nervous. “…What? What does that have to do with anything?”

“I mean, they’re nice and all. For sure,” Fabian tilted his head thoughtfully. “And they smell good. But I naturally have near-perfect skin –”

Riz snorted. He couldn’t help it. Fabian glared at him but his lips were twitching. “Hey, I’m still talking.”

“I’m still listening. To whatever this is.”

“It’ll become clear in like, two seconds, okay?”

“If you say so.”

Fabian shushed him. “I like it when you make face masks for me because you get so intense about making sure you’re combining the right amounts of the right ingredients. It’s really cute. And then how gentle and focused you are when you’re putting it on my face. And also,” he paused to clear his throat, “sometimes you can’t reach my face that easily because of how I’m sitting so you have to kind of straddle my lap for a minute or two and that’s. Um. I like that.”

He looked bashful. Bashful Fabian. Riz had never thought he’d see the day.

“And it’s nice when you paint my nails too, but mostly because it’s almost like we’re holding hands. And sometimes I can pretend that we’re holding hands for real. In, like… a romantic way.”

Riz thought he was beginning to understand the point of this tangent, but he wanted to make sure his hunch was correct before he acted on it. “And so…” he prompted, heartrate accelerating slightly.

Now Fabian’s expression was mildly peeved. “Do I really have to spell it out for you? I thought you were a detective.”

Riz spread his hands. “Hey, I laid all my cards on the table. It’s only fair if you do the same.”

Fabian groaned. “Can we at least kiss first?”

“Whiny,” Riz groused, but he couldn’t keep a smile off his face. “How about this: I’ll kiss you once for each honest thing you say. And then once you’ve said everything that needs to be said, we can just keep kissing for as long as we want.”

“Okay, deal,” Fabian agreed, looking a little starstruck. “To begin with: I didn’t wanna just kiss you for fun. So it was dumb of you to assume that. But it was also kind of… my fault for not being clear. I guess I was… also afraid that you wouldn’t want to be around me anymore. If you knew what was really up.”

Riz pushed off the refrigerator, slowly walking towards him. “We’re really fucking stupid, aren’t we?”

“We are,” Fabian said, smiling softly.

He stretched out a hand to brush a curl away from Riz’s face – gingerly, like he was nervous that Riz might dissipate if he touched him.

Riz stepped between his knees. He took a moment to simply regard Fabian’s face – the umber of his skin in the evening light, how his dark eyes shone, the angles of his cheekbones, the curve of his lips. He reached up with both hands and carefully smoothed Fabian’s coat away from his chest – Fabian shrugged it off all the way, letting it fall to the floor, eyes locked on Riz, expression soft and awed.

Slowly, gently, tenderly, Riz stroked his hands over Fabian’s bare shoulders – feeling the curve of the muscle, the texture of his skin. And then he lightly laid a hand on Fabian’s cheek, resting the other on one of his thighs. To ground himself.

And then he kissed him. Slowly, gently, tenderly. Just long enough to make a point.

“I love you,” Fabian whispered as he pulled away. Softly. Prayerfully. Like he was breathing it.

Riz kissed him again, a little deeper this time, smiling as he pulled back. “There was another one.”

Fabian smiled too. “I wanna be your boyfriend. I want us to be boyfriends.”

Another kiss. This time Riz let himself lean more heavily into Fabian, lifting a knee to climb partially onto his lap, and Fabian tangled one hand in his hair and reached down to cup his ass with the other.

“Okay, wait, I’m still not done yet,” Fabian said breathlessly, pulling away.

“What else is there?” Riz asked. A bit impatiently. Even he was getting tired of holding himself back.

Fabian smirked. “I wanna have sex with you.”

Riz huffed a laugh and kissed his jaw. “Is that really your finishing line? You’re gonna end on that one?”

“Hey! I never said that was the last one.”

“Well, the last one better be really good,” Riz murmured, nuzzling his neck.

Fabian pulled him fully onto his lap. “I’ve been in love with you for a long time. I think at least since freshman year. Maybe even earlier. I think – I think how I felt about you was partly how I realized I was into guys.”

Riz lifted his head to look Fabian in the eyes. “Really?” He felt like he was losing his mind, just a little.

Fabian gazed at him with an expression Riz could now identify as ‘enamored’. “Yeah,” he said. “Embarrassing, right?”

Riz laughed, nose pressed against Fabian’s cheek, arms wrapped tight around his neck. He felt like he was on fire, but in a good way. Like he was combusting with happiness. “That’s not embarrassing. I think – same, probably. It just took me way longer than you to realize.”

Fabian kissed his ear. “Guess I’m the smart one in the relationship after all.”

“I mean, the jury’s still out on that one.”

“Great, good to know you’re still just as rude to me now that we’re boyfriends.”

“You love it.” Riz kissed his cheek, his neck, his collarbone. Fabian’s hand tightened in his hair.

“Okay, so all my cards are on the table now.”

“Mmm.”

“And the thing is, I have all these ideas in my head about the nasty, truly depraved shit I wanna do to you that I’ve been dreaming about for like, two years.”

“Mmmmm.”

“So can we –”

Riz chuckled into the curve of his jaw. “Thought you’d never ask.”

“All right, perfect.”

Riz was still laughing as Fabian gathered him in his arms and rose to his feet. He felt like he couldn’t stop laughing – not because anything was really that funny, but because he was holding so much happiness his body couldn’t contain it.

It was only while Fabian carried him down the hall to his bedroom that Riz realized the pasta was definitely cold by now. Oh, well. They could heat it up again and eat it later. There was plenty of time for that.

They had all the time in the world.

(Summer) (Post High School)

“The Ball? Can I ask you something?”

Riz rolled over to look at Fabian. They were both lying on Fabian’s ridiculously ornate brocade bedspread in Seacaster Manor, the glow of dusk through the window washing them both in hazy amber-blue. Fabian was propped against the pillows and Riz stretched out perpendicular to him, head hanging off the edge of the mattress. From here he had an upside-down view of Fabian’s shelf of bloodrush trophies. They glinted gold in the fading sunlight.

“What is it?”

Fabian didn’t say anything for a long moment, biting his lip and gazing out the window at the darkening sky. “Do you… do you think we’re still gonna be friends? In college?”

Riz considered cracking a joke about pretending not to know who Fabian was as soon as they got out of Elmville. But then he noticed the way Fabian’s left hand was twisting the corner of his pillow.

“Of course we will,” he said softly.

Fabian sighed in relief. And then said quietly, as if he was worried someone else might hear: “You really are my best friend – you know that, right?”

Riz felt his cheeks stretch into a smile. “You’re my best friend, too.”

“I know.” Fabian ran a hand through his hair.

“I bet we’ll be best friends even after college,” Riz said thoughtfully. (And hopefully.)

The mattress shifted as Fabian rotated to lay down parallel to Riz, his own head hanging off the bed, platinum hair lifting higher away from his forehead than normal. His eyes looked like dark honey in this light. Riz wanted to stare, but he didn’t want to be weird. He glanced away, fixing his gaze on the vaulted ceiling.

“We’ll be best friends forever, I bet,” Fabian said, conversationally, like he was theorizing about the weather tomorrow.

Riz heart thudded. “That would be… neat.”

“Hey, The Ball?”

“Mmm.”

“Hey – you’re not looking at me. Look at me!” Fabian reached out to gently shake Riz’s arm and Riz turned his head to the side to face him, snickering.

“Do you think – if we both get really old and neither of us are married, do you think we’ll just have to marry each other? Since we’re, like, best friends?”

Fabian was watching him intently with this slightly anxious look in his eyes, and it made Riz feel weird, so he focused on the pale stubble on the corner of his jaw where he’d missed a spot shaving. “I – well, you don’t think you’re gonna marry Aelwen?”

Fabian closed his eyes, and for a moment it was silent except for Riz’s heartbeat. “I mean… this is just… hypothetical.”

The air between them felt strange.

“Are you that desperate to get married?” Riz said, trying to bring the conversation back into a teasing realm where it was easier to breathe.

Fabian opened his eyes, snickering despite himself. “Don’t be an asshole. I’m being serious.”

“You’re serious about marrying me? Why, this is all so sudden, Fabian!” Riz mock-gasped, lifting a hand to theatrically fan himself.

“Wha – shut up! Obviously, I don’t like – want to marry you! This is just if, like – if we’re both still single when we’re, like. Forty or whatever.”

“Forty? That seems young. I feel like a lot of people get married after that.”

“Okay, fine, fifty then.”

“I mean, that’s still –”

“Sixty?”

“More like ninety.”

“I’m not gonna get married when I’m ninety, The Ball, I still wanna look hot in my tux.”

“You don’t think you’re gonna be hot when you’re ninety?”

Fabian frowned. “You do?”

“I didn’t – I mean, whatever.” Riz stared at the ceiling again, feeling awkward. “How about eighty?”

“Seventy-five, and that’s my final offer.”

“Your final offer? This was your idea, you know. I have zero stake in this.”

“Oh, please, marrying me would be a privilege.”

“You’re right, I’ve always dreamed of having such a modest husband.”

Fabian huffed and shoved Riz’s shoulder. “Asshole. Are you in or are you out?”

“Okay, fine, I’m in.”

Fabian stretched out his hand and Riz shook it. “You’re aware that this is some dumb bullshit, right?” he said. “Like, no one ever actually does this.”

“Shut up! I need a contingency plan.”

“I still don’t get why you care so much about getting married.”

“Because I want to have a wedding before I die, The Ball! I mean, it’s a whole party all about me! What could be better?”

“Well, to begin with, it would be about both you and me –”

“Only if we’re still single at seventy-five.”

Riz sighed. “Yeah, yeah. Only if we’re still single at seventy-five. Then we’ll get married and have, like, a loveless sham marriage that we only entered into so we could host an extravagant wedding. Sounds great.”

There was a pause. “It wouldn’t… I mean, it wouldn’t have to be. Loveless.”

Riz sneaked a look at Fabian, who lay stiffly next to him, eyes trained on the ceiling.

“Well…” he began slowly, unsure of what Fabian meant by that. “Okay.” He didn’t quite know what to say.

“That will probably never happen anyway, though,” Fabian added quickly.

“…Okay?”

“Because, I mean, I have fifty-five years to find a wife before then. And you have fifty-seven years to get married, too.”

“Wouldn’t we both have fifty-seven years? Because we would wait until we’re both seventy-five?”

Fabian glared at him. “Shut up!”

Riz cackled. As he calmed down, he shifted closer to Fabian, letting their arms touch. “Just think. Fifty-seven more years of being best friends.”

“Probably more.”

Riz nodded. “Probably more.” And then he furrowed his brow thoughtfully. “Actually… definitely more. Because we’ll still be best friends even if we get married.”

“Oh, yeah. I guess I didn’t think about that.”

“It’s because I’m the smart one.”

Fabian reached over to flick his shoulder and Riz shrank away from him, laughing.

“Hey, The Ball.”

“Yeah?”

Their faces were close together. Riz could see the darker flecks in Fabian’s irises.

“I’m glad we’re best friends,” Fabian said quietly.

Riz smiled. “Me too.”

(Present Day)

Riz had slept over at Fabian’s apartment dozens of times over the last three years but until very recently, he’d crashed on the couch every single time – he still wasn’t completely used to waking up in Fabian’s actual bed. It was a lot more comfortable, he had to admit. All the furniture in Fabian’s home was stupidly expensive, which meant that the sofa was a minimalist ‘design piece’ with clean lines and zero squishiness but the mattress was king-size and engineered for optimal sweet dreams. He also owned fancy sheets made from soft elven fabric that probably had a thread count higher than Riz’s annual tuition, and his bedroom featured a sunny bay window with a fifth-story view, plush carpeting, and a vase of enchanted potpourri that made the air smell faintly of peaches and bergamot. Aside from the frankly tacky wall painting of a ship and the ever-present flotsam of laundry on the floor, it wasn’t a half-bad place to spend the night.

Of course, staying there meant sharing the bed with a person who muttered in his sleep about everything from sword fighting to crème brûlée, wore a silk sleep mask to bed but still insisted that Riz lean over and kiss him good night after he’d already put it on, and shook Riz awake in the middle of the night to ask him seemingly random questions about things like whether he thought it was important to read books in their original language or whether he thought leopards judged lions for having ‘more boring fur’. In hindsight, Riz probably shouldn’t have been surprised that Fabian as a boyfriend was even more high-maintenance than ever before.

(Riz kind of loved it, though.) (And he loved Fabian.)

“Good morning, angel,” Fabian murmured. The duvet rustled as he squeezed his arms more tightly around Riz, humming contentedly and hooking his chin over Riz’s shoulder.

“Mmmph. Hello,” Riz yawned. “Can you hand me my glasses? I think I left them over on that side.”

“Of course, darling.” Fabian kissed his temple and then leaned away to reach his nightstand. Riz sat up slowly, rubbing his eyes.

“Do you think I look good in these?” Fabian asked, putting the glasses on and sitting back against the headboard.

“I wish I could say, but I can’t really see you,” Riz said through another yawn. “And I can’t believe I just asked you to hand me my glasses and you’re basically doing the opposite of that. I ask you for so little, you know.”

“Oh, is that true? Because I seem to recall you asking me for quite a lot of things last night.” Fabian handed over the glasses with a smirk.

Riz huffed a laugh as he put them on. “Truly amazing that you just woke up and you’re already this horny.” He collapsed back onto the pillows, beaming at his boyfriend. His boyfriend, who looked just utterly, unfairly handsome with the morning sunlight warming his bare chest and a few loose strands of hair falling carelessly over his forehead.

“I can’t help it when I see you wearing my shirt. It drives me crazy.”

Riz laughed as Fabian propped himself above him, leaning down to kiss his neck. “Oh yeah? Does it just get you all – hot and bothered – that I didn’t buy any of my own sleepwear?”

“Mmm. It gets me all hot and bothered that it’s you, wearing something of mine. It’s like you’re –”

“All yours, baby.” Riz smiled and Fabian raised his head to smile back. His hair looked goofy in an adorable way – all flattened on one side and sticking up on the other. Riz lifted a hand to run his fingers through it and then pulled Fabian down into a languid kiss.

There were a few things that had changed in the couple of weeks since Riz and Fabian became boyfriends-who-were-also-best-friends instead of best-friends-but-not-boyfriends. The obvious one was that the amount of kissing and sex had skyrocketed above prior levels. They also now had sleepovers almost every night, instead of merely every week. And they were, in general, much more open with each other. Nowadays when Riz found himself in class daydreaming about Fabian working on his motorcycle, he could just text Fabian himself about it instead of silently admonishing himself for having sexy thoughts about his best friend. If he thought Fabian looked especially attractive on a certain day (read: every day) he could simply tell him. He could say ‘I love you’ on the phone and know that Fabian was hearing it the same way he meant it.

But there were some things that hadn’t changed, and probably never would. Riz’s love for Fabian ran deeper than romance, deeper even than friendship – it was something in his bones, encoded in his DNA, the undertones of every color he could see, and this had been true for such a long time that it had become simply a given fact within his understanding of himself and the world he lived in. His name was Riz, and he loved Fabian. These were things that were fundamentally real.

Fabian could always make him laugh. Fabian could always calm him down when he was too fired up. He always wanted to talk to Fabian even when he was annoyed at him over something petty, and he always wanted to hang out with Fabian even when he was too exhausted to do anything but lean against him on the couch and play games on his phone. He would always want Fabian in his life – he’d refrained from mentioning that specific fact as of yet because he didn’t want to seem too forward, but he also somehow felt like Fabian… got it.

“Hey,” Fabian said, rolling onto his back and pulling Riz on top of him.

“Hmm?”

“I wanna tell you something.”

Riz snickered, kissing along his cheekbone. “Is it that you ate the last of my avocado spread? Because I already knew about that. I just didn’t bring it up because I was hoping you’d be decent enough to come forward about it.”

“Oh, hush. That wasn’t me, it was definitely Fig.” Fabian lightly swatted Riz’s shoulder. “I wanted to tell you about a, uh… different thing.”

Riz stilled, resting his forehead on Fabian’s. “Yeah?”

Fabian’s eyes were huge. “I… I’m staying here.”

“Staying where? In this apartment?”

“In this… I’m staying in Solace. I’m not gonna take that bard-for-hire job I was talking about. Like, I might still travel to, like, adventure and shit, but I wanna be based here. With, uh. Wherever you are. Is where I wanna be.”

Riz felt his heart swelling outside the confines of his ribcage. “I would like that,” he whispered.

Fabian pretended to gasp. “What? Are you, like, into me or something?”

“Like, kind of, I guess,” Riz said, rolling his eyes. “You’re all right. Buy me a drink and maybe we can talk.”

“Well, I plan on sticking around for the foreseeable future just for you, so maybe we could even do dinner AND drinks.”

Riz kissed the side of his nose. “Don’t get ahead of yourself.”

“Can I start by making you some breakfast, then?” Fabian murmured, sitting up until Riz was positioned on his lap.

Riz hummed and leaned in to kiss him again, slow and passionate, encircling Fabian’s neck with his arms and pressing their bodies together.

“You have to actually let me get up to cook, you know.” Fabian drew away after an eternity, a hint of humor in his tone.

Riz laughed into his shoulder. “I’m happy you’re staying, sweetheart.”

Fabian tilted his chin up and smiled at him – the smile that Riz could now recognize as his dopey, in-love smile. “I never really planned on leaving, anyway. I couldn’t stay away from you that long.”

“Yeah? Are you under a supernatural obligation to pester me periodically?”

“Rude? I’m cooking breakfast for you, you know.”

“Get up and do it, then,” Riz said, arching an eyebrow. And then he dissolved into laughter as Fabian swept his arms underneath Riz’s thighs and stood up off the bed, carrying him into the kitchen.

Riz could see himself getting used to this for quite a while.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *makes half the scenes in my fics take place at sunset because sunsets are pretty and i can do whatever i want*
> 
> The next chapter - which I will post sometime this week - is an epilogue scene that really adds nothing essential to the narrative and I have no reason for including it but I'm going to anyway because this is my world and we're all living in it baby
> 
> Thank you all so much for reading and for your wonderfully kind and supportive comments and kudos! <3 I'm so happy this story could bring you a bit of light during this seriously trying time. My next d20 fic will be a CoC theobold/lapin one-shot. Haha kidding! (Not kidding.) (I really am kidding though!) (Or am I?) (I am.) (I'm not.) (Haha jk!) (Unless...?)


	7. (& Ever)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> fluff? did somebody order some more fluff? could i interest u in some fluff perhaps?

(Spring) (Three Years in the Future)

“You look hot in that suit.”

“Just wait ‘til you see what I’ve got on under it,” Riz said with a wink.

Fabian gasped, sputtering. “Why, The Ball!”

They were sitting at one of many cream-colored outdoor tables, sheltered in the dappled light of oak trees, feeling for all the world like a pair of grandparents as they watched the other couples on the dance floor – an enchanted rose quartz platform that hovered a couple of inches above the wild grass and glittered in the golden late-afternoon light. Fabian had, of course, kept dancing for long after Riz tapped out but eventually he’d joined his boyfriend in the shade, claiming that Fig and Ayda’s playlist ‘leaves much to be desired.’ Riz wasn’t complaining. Especially now that Fabian had abandoned his suit jacket to reveal his form-fitting silk vest.

Riz smiled to himself as Fig dipped her bride in the center of the dance floor, diamond studs twinkling in her horns. After four months of agonizing over whether she wanted to wear a gown or a tux, Gorgug and Adaine had worked together to craft a magical outfit that changed back and forth every few minutes – maintaining the same fiery color scheme, but in a slightly different style each time. The wedding photographer had their work cut out for them.

“Do you think that’ll be us someday?”

Riz turned to see Fabian smiling softly at him. He reached up to fix one of Fabian’s stray hairs and Fabian closed his eyes, grinning.

“Not sure,” Riz teased. “I mean, are you really, like, husband material?”

Fabian scoffed. A beam of sunlight slanted across his face and lit some of his eyelashes up gold. “I moved that dresser for you yesterday, you know!”

“I didn’t ask you to do that,” Riz reminded him, lips twitching. “It didn’t even need to be moved. It was fine where it was.”

“Didn’t I look all strong and hot doing it, though?” Fabian pouted.

“You did. I guess you’d make a good, like, trophy husband.”

He opened his mouth to, doubtless, say something indignant, but just then Kristen sat down heavily at their table, shrugging her suit jacket over the curlicue-metal seatback behind her. “Hey, guys. Did you get tired of the music, too?”

“Right? It’s pretty wack,” Fabian said, leaning forward on his elbows.

“You’d think, being a musician, that she’d listen to better music.”

“Maybe it’s like an ego thing where she can’t listen to artists that she thinks are better than her.”

“What’s wrong with it?” Riz asked, genuinely curious. The playlist sounded fine to him.

They both flashed him pitying looks. “You just have no taste, angel,” Fabian told him, patting his arm.

“There must be Bad Music Taste Juice in the water in that apartment he and Fig used to live in,” Kristen commented. Fabian silently held his fist out for a bump.

“Well, I look forward to hearing the much-better music at your wedding, then.”

Kristen shrugged. “I don’t know if me and Tracker are even gonna get married. I mean, if our love is real, do we have to prove it?”

“It’s a big party just for you, though. Do you not want that?” Fabian knocked back a champagne flute.

“It would be for both her and Tracker, dear,” Riz said. “Do you understand what a wedding is? I’m starting to feel like you might not actually understand what a wedding is.”

“Of course I understand what a wedding is! I’ve had a wedding Magical Pinterest board for, like, seven years.”

“You’ve had a Magical Pinterest account for seven years?” Kristen asked.

“That’s kind of embarrassing, honey,” Riz said matter-of-factly, reaching up to fix another stray hair.

“Well, I have…” Fabian made a thoughtful face. “Fifty years to keep perfecting my board. That’s so much time. I haven’t even gotten started on the catering menu yet.”

“You think you’re gonna have a Magical Pinterest account fifty years from now?” Kristen asked, sipping her mimosa and staring at him like he was something to be studied.

“Well, unless Riz decides to put a ring on it early.”

“You won’t be surprised if you’re constantly waiting for it,” Riz remarked as he fixed Fabian’s bowtie – it had gotten crooked when he was dancing.

“I won’t be surprised anyway. I’m a catch.”

“Mm-hmm. Sure you are.”

“I am!”

“Mm-hmm.”

Kristen smirked at them, slouching back in her chair. “You two are cute. Maybe I will get married after all. I’ll get married the day before you guys and my wedding will be exactly the same in every way but just ever-so-slightly better. Like, the same color scheme but more vibrant. The same wine but a slightly more expensive version. The wine glasses will sound just a tiny bit prettier if you tap them with a spoon.”

“You’d never manage it,” Fabian scoffed. “My wedding will blow your mind. And you’ll never guess what we’re going to do because my design ideas are out of this world.”

“I mean, can’t I just look at your Magical Pinterest board?” Kristen held up her crystal screen.

“How did you find that?” Fabian darted his hands forward to grab it but Kristen dodged out of the way, cackling.

Riz laughed fondly as Fabian stood to attempt to grapple Kristen and Kristen scurried away, giggling hysterically, almost tripping over a clump of wildflowers.

The breeze gently shook the bouquet of daffodils, hyacinths, and tulips in a crystal vase on the table and the sun sank lower in the cornflower-blue sky. Birds twittered from the treetops above the waltzy beat of a slow dance ballad playing from the DJ’s speakers, the chatter of the wedding guests as they milled around the woodland meadow, the beating of Riz’s own heart.

There was something comforting about the annual arrival of spring, Riz thought.

It happened every year like clockwork, stretching the days out longer and reminding the world that everything changed endlessly forever but at the same time, nothing ever changed at all.

It was his eleventh spring of knowing his best friend. Eleven times the sun had returned after a dark winter, eight times a school year had wound down to its demise and three more times summer had risen on the horizon even without an academic calendar to herald it, an innumerable number of gradually warmer sunsets. A lot of things were different now than they’d been eleven years ago. But the sun kept setting, and spring kept coming, and Fabian kept waving at him from the other side of the dance floor as he held Kristen in a playful headlock, silk vest glinting like the pinprick gems in his ears, blinding grin even brighter than his hair. Everything was so different now than it had been when Riz was fourteen, but also everything was the same.

He couldn’t wait to find out what would change in the next fifty years.

(He already knew what wouldn’t change.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you, again, for reading! I wish you all the best in these trying times! <3

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading, I hope you enjoyed! Have a nice day and take care of yourself <3 see you in chapter 2


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